Can't get 2 IDE drives working on A4000

[Thomas]

it only sees the master harddisk, not the slave.

Big question: who is "it" ? Workbench ? HDToolbox ?

Workbench will not see the second drive is the first one has the "this is the last drive" flag saved to it.

HDToolbox should see either none or both drives. It will also change the above flag if you click on the first drive.

I had WHD0 until WHD8, copied (cloned) the old harddisks (copy dh0:#? whd0: all clone quiet) also fine but suddenly WHD0 was gone,

This sounds very much like a 4GB problem, especially because you say

although it was just plain FFS and about 1GB.

which might mean that you didn't understand what the 4GB problem is.

[Thomas]

This is the last device, This is the last LUN on the old IDE drive, so I unticked it, rebooted and... All gone

That's the reason why it's recommended *not* to use HDInstTool. It might look better than HDToolbox but it has worse bugs.

Is there a way to get the data back?

This should help: http://aminet.net/package/disk/salv/RDBrecov

Read the manual carefully and if you are unsure, please ask *before* you do anything which could write to the HDD.

[Thomas]

Am I right?

Yes, you are. But it is not necessary to boot from floppy disk if you have another boot medium (the SCSI HDD for example).

The emergency disk is only needed if you lost your last working HDD.

Could you give me a hand on fixing the FFS partitions too?

Not sure what you mean by "fixing the FFS partitions". You can recover all partitions in the same way: begin at the lowest cylinder number (2), enter start cylinder (2) and number of cylinders (305), change dos type (444f5303) and block size (512). Then continue with the next partition with the next higher cylinder number (308) and repeat the steps.

444f5303 is DOS\3 and means FFS International.
444f5301 is DOS\1 and means FFS without any other options.

[Thomas]

the manual said something about gaps in FFS partitions

If you have gaps between partitions (cylinders not occupied by partitions), then FFS partitions might not be found. But your partitions were all found, so no problem to proceeed.

[Thomas]

Perhaps a corrupted RDB (loop in pointers).

Try this before you run HDToolbox: http://thomas-rapp.homepage.t-online.de/downloads/killrdb.lha

HDToolbox will then think the drive is empty, so it needs to be installed again.

[Thomas]

There should be only one thing which HDToolbox allows you to do now: install the drive.

Yes, make sure to use the same values for number of cylinders and blocks per cylinder as before. After installing it should allow you to add partitions without freeze.

I don't want to destroy the drive again

Well, you have nothing right now. It cannot get worse, can it ?

[Thomas]

I can't because SFS is not installed on the emergency bootdisk

There is no need to install SFS on the boot disk, you can load the file from wherever it is, for example from the SCSI disk. Just go to Add/update in HDToolbox, click on Add and select the file.

after fiddling around it worked

There is one unused cylinder between "WB3-IDE" and "Spare": WB3 ends in cylinder 306 and Spare begins in cylinder 308. Cylinder 307 is not used, but it has been used earlier because it contains one "Possible FFS bootblock".

I don't know how to thank you but thanks a lot!

You are welcome. Those programs were not written to lie around unused on Aminet.

[Thomas]

Yes, it should be safe.