A1200 Hard Drive Problems (x2)

[that_punk_guy]

r0nn13 wrote:

cutting line 1 in the IDE cable may help

Why would cutting the IDE cable help? Does this remove the boot priority signal or something?

Don't cut your IDE cable![/u]

Line one sends a reset signal to the HDD when you soft-reset the Amiga. Cutting it cures some problems with HDDs showing up on the initial boot but disappearing after the reset, but that's not what's happening here.

[that_punk_guy]

r0nn13 wrote:
2. Does the drive spin up in time for AmigaOS to see it. If not then cutting line 1 in the IDE cable may help or install kickstart 3.1
KS3.1 already is installed and you can here it spinning up

Just because you can hear it spin up, doesn't mean it has spun up fast enough for the OS to make detect it in time. However, this doesn't appear to be the problem.

3. Do you have enough power to run 3.5" drive. Do NOT use the 23W PSU with the A1200.
It is a 2.5" HD and I had a 2.5" 6.5Gb drive formatted to 4GB in there previously

An A1200 PSU should be okay, and an A500 PSU is certainly sufficient, unless you have a gigantic accelerator we don't know about.

4. If you like try other Filesystems such as PFS3 or SFS instead of FFS.
I have OS3.5 and OS3.9 on Original CD, given to me from a friend whose A4000 died last year. Could I use a file system from these CD's in WB3.1? If so how do you go about doing that then?

I would worry about that later, get it working with the standard FFS first. Messing around with that too brings too many variables into the equation.

[that_punk_guy]

Now, what you're describing - The HD being available only after a reset - would usually indicate there was a problem with the spin-up time. However, given that you have v3.1 ROMs and it's taking five resets to get the drives to show, I think something else could be causing it.

I was going to ask if you were sure the cable was good, but from the sounds of it you're using the same cable to connect this drive and the working one?

[that_punk_guy]

I'm amazed you got five resets in before the drive spun right up, but anyways...

Creating a boot floppy that waits for, say 15 seconds, before warm-resetting the Amiga is dead simple. I'm not really sure there's much benefit to doing that, other than to assure a non-attended boot. Depends if you really have a problem with waiting around a few seconds for the drive to spin up.

I don't think soft resets on each boot have an adverse effect. Plus, you get to see that lovely rainbow-tick screen on every boot! :-D

Regarding power, I ran a 68030 accelerator and HDD in my A1200 using an A500 PSU for about two and a half years with no problems.

[that_punk_guy]

Uh... it's probably not worth following this because I just realised a major flaw in my plan...

that_punk_guy was writing:
Okay... I'm going to guess what your abilities are from what you've said so far, so ask if you're not clear on something.

First, make a copy of your Workbench disk. We're going to turn it into the boot floppy, so once it's copied it's also a good idea to rename the disk from the Workbench, to something like BootFloppy.

Most of the things you need to make the disk (and much more besides) are already on the disk, but there is one thing you need to get from Aminet, the program that actually does the reset. You can download that here. It's in an LhA archive, we'll deal with it later. You also need to download the Amiga program LhA to extract it.

Now it's much easier to dictate what needs to be done using shell commands, so I will. There's an icon for the shell on your Workbench disk, and your hard disk providing it's installed properly.

First, so that we have a bit more room to breathe, delete the contents of the Utilities directory on the new Boot Floppy. They'd be required for general Workbench use, but not for our purposes. With the Boot Floppy write-enabled and in the main floppy drive, type the following commands at the shell prompt:

cd df0:utilities
delete #? all quiet

At this point you'll have to extract the reboot command from the archive you downloaded above. This is the annoying, tedious part. Format a non-High Density (any spare Amiga disk will do) to 720K capacity on the PC (I've assumed you're using a PC and have downloaded the above files on a PC.) Copy the 'reboot.lha' and 'LhA' files to the floppy and then pop it in your Amiga. In the Amiga's shell, type:

mount pc0:
copy pc0:#? ram:
protect ram:LhA RWED ADD
protect ram:reboot.lha RWD ADD

Now take replace the Boot Floppy in the disk drive and type the following:

ram:lha x ram:reboot.lha df0:c

That copies the contents of the archive into the C directory of the Boot Floppy. The last thing to do is edit the startup-sequence of the disk. To start the editor, type:

ed df0:s/startup-sequence

When the editor appears, it CTRL-Y repeatedly, until each line of text is gone. Then add the lines:

wait 15 secs
coldreboot

You might want to change '15' to make the wait longer/shorter, but don't forget that booting off floppy in itself causes a delay because of the slow disk access. You can always go back and change it by repeating the last couple of steps. Now that you've added those two lines, press the following keys: Escape, then X, then Enter. That saves the startup-sequence and exits the editor.

If you reset now with the Boot Floppy in the drive, it should boot and wait the specified time before resetting.

Well, I got this far into my epic guide when I realised that you've gotta be there to eject the floppy so it doesn't just boot from it again anyway! Argh!

*Bangs head against table*