"Preparing HD for AmigaOS3.1" for beginners ... or not ????

[Effy]

I have a very tiny problem that I am not supposed to have ...
After having trouble to get my 20 Gb IDE hd working again on my Z4 Powerflyer, I decided to give up and start all over again. Booting with a new Emergency Floppy didn´t work because I got strange errors during startup sequence.
Okay, then the hard way. Boot from Install3.1 floppy, HDtoolbox, the adviced sequence of "change drive type - low level format - verify data on drive - partition - reboot". That is the correct way, isn´t it But after a reboot there is no icon in my workbench of BOOT: ... so I load HDtoolbox again and to my not so happy surprise I see that nothing has changed at all, like I never did any partitionning  :pissed:
That´s why I used in the title "for beginners ... or not ??" because it all looks to simple but still I can´t get it to work ...

[Effy]

Orjan : have I forgotten to write that in my post Trust me, I DID a "save changes on drive" and then "exit" and then I got a window telling me that I need to do a reboot first before changes take place ... been there, done that, but it didn´t make a difference ...

[Effy]

A (Zorro4) Powerflyer will divide any big harddrive into partitions of 4 Gb each. That is standard, so the Amiga thinks he has got several 4 Gb harddrives. So in the first "harddrive" I tried to make a BOOT partition of 49 Mb ... how difficult can this be

[Effy]

Interesting questions Thomas ...  :-)

-Did you run FastATA.driver in your startup-sequence ?
 There is normally not enough place to mount the software on an already filled Install3.1 floppy ... but I tried that too,including the AllegroCDFS software ... no better result so I went back to the original floppy ...

-Does partitioning of one of the other 4GB parts work ?
Didn´t try it because the A1200 looks at the first 2 Gb of any harddrive, doesn´t it ??

-What happens if you disable split mode and try to partition the entire hdd ?
Now this is interesting because to my surprise the option "split" is disabled ... don´t know why ...

-What were the problems you had with the drive initially which made you try to start all over again ?
Now this is easy to answer, just referring to a topic here ...

-Does the drive work on the internal IDE bus ?
Gosh, where could I find an old 2,5" cable for that

-Did you check the correct placement of cables and jumpers ? A loose cable can well cause strange effects.
Checked that, it´s supposed to be a standard procedure ...

-Why doesn't your emergency floppy work ?
Startup sequence gives error on ">" sign that it doesn´t know. But according to DirOpus on my other working Amiga this sign is not even there on the floppy, but it does have that sign in the startup sequence of the Emergency Disc on the CDrom ... but still the OS 3.9 CDrom is mounted, but I can not load HDtoolbox ...

[Effy]

I really need to give you all a major big thank you for all the very good high quality advice you have given me. I really hoped it would all answer my fears, but it all turned out to be totally different ... I have given the answer already in my other topic but I shall give it again here :

One week later, after a lot of Chianti italian red wine, a lot of headaches, and a two day sickness, I decided to give it another go and try a really dumb (?) idea of one of our Amiga Club members, changing the IDE cable by another one. As I thought, a not so intelligent idea .. but this really stupid thought of mine turns out to be one of the biggest screw ups of my last years, because it WAS the IDE cable that has been the cause of all my trouble !! I used another one and suddenly everything worked again, the HD and the CDrom ... man, can you imagine how stupid I suddenly felt  :-?

So in case I did not get through : THANKS FOR ALL THE EFFORTS !! It did not always help but it did give me a safe feeling of being heard by people that know a lot more of it than I do and from that point of view this forum is like a heaven for those in need of help ...