A1200 weird booting issues.

[motorollin]

Your hard drive probably doesn't spin up in time for Kickstart to check whether it's there. By the time you reboot, it has spun up and is then detected.

I have heard that cutting pin 1 of the HDD cable can stop this happening, but I've never actually tried it.

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moto

[motorollin]

1NOM155 wrote:
CUT the PIN 1??? lolol don't say, if you cut that you can't use the disk

Rubbish. Pin 1 is just the reset line. The disk will work perfectly fine without it.

This thread confirms that the drive *will* work without pin 1 connected, but it sounds like it won't work in this case. After reading that thread it seems that cutting pin 1 just prevents drives from spinning back down when the Amiga is reset. It won't help if they don't spin up quickly enough in the first place.

@OP
You may want to try upgrading to Kickstart 3.1 if you haven't already, since it introduces a longer boot delay which may give your drive enough time to spin up before Kickstart gives up.

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moto

[motorollin]

r6stu wrote:
Im running OS3.5. I dont get the kickstart prompt. it starts to boot from the HDD   and dose so for the first 5 seconds, then stops on a black screen!  :-?

Upon rebooting its fine.

Oh that's totally different then. Can you post your startup-sequence and hardware config? If it hangs on boot the first time then works after a warm reboot then my gut feeling is that it's something to do with setpatch.

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moto

[motorollin]

Is it save to try with SKIPROMUPDATES scsi.device? What if his HDD is on scsi.device? Maybe it would be better to just boot with no s-s and type "setpatch" to see what output you get. Remember that the default OS3.5/3.9 setpatch line in the s-s includes the "quiet" switch, which is why you don't get any output (even if it hangs or errors). Typing it from the CLI without the QUIET switch will allow you to see whether setpatch is successful.

Also, as I have said, cutting pin 1 of the HDD cable will not help in this case (now I understand fully what the problem is). However I would like to point out for the record that I had pin 1 cut on my old 3.0 A1200 and never had a single problem with it.

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moto

[motorollin]

r6stu wrote:
I have std 2.5" IDE, HDD Blizzard 1220/4 RAM expansion, and Archos CDrom drive, with their cd drivers installed. and a network card sometimes.

Do you have 3.1 ROM chips? Also you're right at the bottom of the system requirements for OS3.5. Maybe setpatch is having problems soft-kicking the ROM Update in to such a small amount of RAM? (It is enough, but Setpatch may be pausing with some warning which you can't see. This will be visible if you boot without s-s and just type "setpatch").

r6stu wrote:
I also notice that when the cd rom drive is connected it pauses, and reads the cd

That's normal. When Kickstart probes the IDE bus it looks at the CD-ROM drive to check whether it's a hard drive. The CD-ROM drive responds by spinning up its disc.

r6stu wrote:
I assume thats trying to boot from cd.

Technically, no it's not. It's just checking whether it's a hard disk.

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moto

[motorollin]

What does the text say in the CLI window just before Workbench loads? Also, I couldn't see from the video but is the power LED on the A1200 repeatedly dimming and brightening when it's stuck on the black screen?

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moto

[motorollin]

First of all, comment out the "endcli" from the end of your Startup-Sequence by putting a semicolon at the beginning of the line. That will leave the window there and allow you to read the text to make sure it's not relevant to your problem.

If that doesn't turn anything up, boot with no startup-sequence and type "setpatch" then press enter and post any errors or hang you get.

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moto

[motorollin]

tokyoracer wrote:
Is this normal for a flash disk?

No.

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moto