2nd try: Error 4 in drive description problem, HELP!!

[Dragster]

Hi everbody,

In an attempt to give new life to this thread, I'll post what exactly happened with my Powerflyer problem... I hope someone has been through this before and tell me how to fix it.

Well, I had a hard drive crash, one of my scsi devices caused problems, that led me to do some tweaking on my system. I had two IDE harddrives working in NO SPLIT mode but I had to remove one of the drives and the powerflyer controller from my machine for a while, so I accesed the disks using normal OS 3.9 BB2 scsi.device (setpatch quiet) and hdtoolbox recognized the drive and all just fine (PF no split mode --> OS 3.9 BB2 seems compatible, not the other way around though) but as I removed one drive, hdtoolbox asked me to update the RDB because the other drive was not present anymore, so I did. After recovering my SCSI HD and all I put the controller back on my machine and connected the other drive again, powered it on and I found that the powerflyer recognized the hard drives in SPLIT mode, so the partitions were not recognized by AmigaOS. I expected it to see the disks in NO SPLIT mode as they were originally configured. Well, after seeing that, I went to the ata3 prefs program, selected NO SPLIT and clicked on "use" button, then I went back to hdtoolbox and the disk showed as one (24 GB) but hdtoolbox asked me to reinstall the drive (it didn't recognize the RDB written by hdtoolbox under control of the OS3.9 BB2 scsi.device, so it seems there's no compatibility on the OS39BB2 -- > PF no split mode way), so I clicked ok, and when hdtoolbox tried to read the disk configuration it showed a requester saying "Error 4 in drive description" and it does not allow me to read the drive config or partition it... I then clicked on the requester cancel button and well, that's where all my problems began. Everytime I try to set up the disk in no split mode I get this error... if I go back to OS 32.9 bb2 setpatch and read the drive config and partition the drive as it was originally, everything works fine... it's just under the ata3.driver control when I get these problems. Of course I want to recover my partitions and reinstall the drive as it was and leave it working with the powerflyer in NO SPLIT  mode but it seems impossible...

I've tried with older versions of hdtoolbox (even with OS 3.5 ones), same problem... I've tried hdinsttools from aminet and when I go back to hdtoolbox and read the drive's geometry I get the same error...

any ideas?  Please HELP!!!!!!

Thank you,

Dragster

[Dragster]

Hi x56h4,

well, the data is not really lost, If reinstall and partition the drive under OS3.9BB2 with no ata3.driver loaded I can recover everything, I have the information of the partitions and mount files... it's just that I need to leave it as it was under the powerflyer control. I believe I have thge latest powerflyer drivers (6.1).  Already contacted elbox too but still no reply from them.

I've tried other things like booting from the emergency disk and running the ata3.driver from there to avoind corrupted env prefs files and such and I get the same result.

Thanks!!