Booting from compactflash.device or scsi.device automagically

[Franko]

First a little background:
I wanted to have all of my 80GB ide drive usable as a single sfs formatted boot volume.
Because my A1200 has 3.0 kickstart roms, I'm stuck only being able to boot from within the first 4GB of the drive.
Initially the procedure below was developed to let me bootstrap from a small 4MB partition on my drive, load all the necessary patches, then reboot to the large ~75GB partition.

I don't quite understand why you need to deploy this method to use a HD. I simply bootup from one of my 500GB HDs and straight away I have access to both my 500GB HDs with partition sizes of my own choice.

Seems to me your going a long way round to do something that is available from power up, why do you have to reboot ?

[Franko]

Still not quite sure why you have to do this, whether you use 3.0 or 3.1 roms the boot partition still has to be in the first 4GB space of a hard disk. I can only assume that you don't have any form of buffered interface on your Amiga.

I use SFS myself and it works straight from the first boot up using either the FastATA MKIII board or the 4xIDE board on my A1200's. I don't use those CF card adapters myself but it seems like you've come up with a pretty neat solution to your problem.

[Franko]

The internal IDE controller can only access the first 4GB of a drive at boot time. If you have a 500GB drive fully working at boot time, then it is not connected to the internal IDE controller but to some third-party controller which supports large harddrives by firmware. Or you have a ROM expansion like Deneb, eFlash or Kickflash which contain the needed drivers.

Not to mention that there is no way to boot from PCMCIA without loading drivers first.

I had stated that I use the FastATA MKIII & the 4xEIDE boards in my A1200s, I didn't think that anyone would still be using a direct connection to the MB these days, it's way too slow that way for my liking...

Im not keen on those CF adapter things, I prefer to use USB and a multi card adapter...