Amiga 1200 Hard Disk - PLEASE HELP!!!

[MrPaulT]

hi!

after 6 years of searching i finally got an amiga 1200 again, but this time it had a hard disk attached, which i thought was a great bonus! However, whoever sold it to me appears to have low level formatted it first and now whenever i try to set up this hard disk on HDTools, it appears fine, looks to partition fine, and then ignores it as soon as i close the program. When i run HDSetup afterwards it says "Not in amigaDos format". I'm getting incredibly frustrated with this as i've been trying for a week to get it sorted. I also got these GVP HD Install disks with it, but they are errored so i can't use them! Has anyone got any suggestions? All i know is it is a SCSI 256mb Hard Disk (which is all i need really cos i only want to play bloodnet). Bear in mind i haven't a clue about anything technical with the amiga so please if you can help respond in Layman's Terms otherwise it would go straight over my head.

Thanks in advance...
Paul

[lorddef]

Are you clicking "Save Changes" or whatever the button says?

[adz]

Are you sure its SCSI and not mini-IDE? As the A1200 only has a single 44-pin mini-IDE connector on the motherboard. The only way it could be SCSI is if you have a PCMCIA SCSI controller or a Accelerator board based SCSI controller. Either way, make sure the drives paramaters are correct and make sure you save any changes you make. Once you have done that, reboot and you should see something like "DH0:NDOS" on the Worknbench. If that appears try and do a format.

[Azryl]

Once your use HDtoolbox, you save changes to drive

THEN you need to "format" the drive with a file system

fastfilesystem is the best to use for simple harddrive setup

best of luck

[orange]

I would just like to add that you can probably find those GVP floppys at:
http://www.l8r.net/install/

or one of these two:
http://www.amiga-hardware.com/
http://amiga.resource.cx/

just in case you need them (but I'd rather use HDinsttools)

[MrPaulT]

Hi!

Thanks for all your comments. well the hard disk is in some port inside it...don't know which but Workbench only sees it as a SCSI. Every time i click "Save Changes" it just ignores the save and goes back to "not changed" status. I tried some other software to install it where it said something like "invalid rigid disk block" or something.

I'm starting to feel ripped off on the hard disk...

[adolescent]

That's what it is supposed to do.  Once you hit "Save changes to drive", it saves the changes to the partition table (and thus there are no changes pending).  You need to then reboot and format the partitions.  They should show up as DH0:NDOS or DH0:Uninitialized (or something to that effect).  Just click the drive and choose Format Disk from the Icons menu.  (You only need to quick format).

[JonoPike]

Don't use that GVP s**t! It's just like a virus.
If I where you, I installed a normal IDE HDD and
then format the whole thing!

[Merc]

It might be something simple like MultiCX or something else running that's protecting your RDB from being overwritten..  but I suppose if you're not booting from HD in the first place then you're not too likely to be running anything commodities

[SamuraiCrow]

SCSI.device is the name of the software for the IDE controller on the A1200 motherboard.  It was called that for backward-compatability with some utilities designed for the A3000.  If it says "scsi.device" it is the 44-pin IDE header on the A1200 motherboard.  :huh: