A1200 not booting Disks

[kratam]

I just got a A1200 with 8mb accelerator board and 170mb hard disk off ebay.  I formatted the hard disk under workbench 3.1 and rebooted with the 3.1 floppy in the drive.  The amiga shows only a little activity in the disk drive before stopping and comming to rest in amigados.  I had look in the boot menu but dont realy know what i'm looking at.  If anybody could help i would be much apreciated.

tim_calladine@hotmail.com

[MrZammler]

It might be that this particular 3.1 floppy isnt bootable. Which one of the set are you trying? Do you have another disk to try?

Try this: When you power-on the amiga, press both mouse buttons. You'll see the early startup menu. Check there that DF0: (the internal drive) is present, and that it has a lower boot priority than the hard drive.

[kratam]

i did as you said and df0 is present also has a lower boot proirity as well.
also the disk that i am using is the amiga workbench 3.1 disk (original).  It read the disk but then said that the disk was not a dos disk?  no other disk works at all.  its a real head scratcher.

[MrZammler]

If it said that it is not a dos disk, then most likely the disk has died (probably due to age)...

Only possibility now is to locate someone in your area or someone to send you an *ahem*copy*ahem* of his disk so you could install 3.1 to the hard disk.

[kratam]

this is the same with all the disks that i insert into the disk drive, i think it may have something to do with the boot sequence or something like that. Any ideas?
if all else fails i may have to send it back.

thanks again

[kratam]

its a scsi hard disk if that is any help, dont you need driver s for those sorts of drives, could i have deleted the driver as well.

[sizzlingd]

Have you got workbench 3.0?Try re-formatting+booting with this+maybe your discs will run? :-?

[Tahoe]

Hold on....
Workbench 3.1 does boot but comes up in a CLI window, which is normal. It will not boot to workbench (funny enough) at least mine (from Amiga Technologies) doesn't.

To install Workbench on your hard drive you need Install 3.1 (your workbench set should be 6 disk total, Workbench, Extras, Locale, Fonts, Storage and Install).

If you boot from Install 3.1 you will boot to a Workbench environment with the option to install the hard drive.

[kratam]

tried that and it still hangs in amiga dos, doesnt do a dam thing, is it anything to do with my boot sequence.
Remember i have tried a few game disks and they dont work either.

[Merc]

Sounds to me like your floppy drive might be bad if nothing at all will boot up...  

[kratam]

the external drive wont even recognise the disks either, so it cant be that, can it?

[Merc]

Just re-reading your problem, what it sounds like is happening is your hard drive is booting the system but since all you did is format it, there's nothing to load once it gets to the initial AmigaDOS window.

You need to boot with the Install floppy and choose to install the O/S onto your HD, or even just copy the contents of the WB floppy to your partition (this will leave you with an incomplete install though).

If normal AmigaDOS disks won't boot, then your boot priority on the HD could be set too high, normally 0 is where it should be set.  If you set it higher than the internal floppy's priority of 5, you won't be able to boot from the floppy except for non-DOS disks.

Hope that helps!

[tomekm]

get to bootmenu, boot options. at the left select DF0:, insert an install 3.1 disk, click "use" and "boot". if your amiga does not boot from diskdrive that way, you may have your floppy damaged. you should also try to boot with other disks in same way.

[doctorq]

Have you checked that the floppy cable attaches correctly to the floppy drive itself and the floppy drive connector on the motherboard?

If normal AmigaDOS disks won't boot, then your boot priority on the HD could be set too high, normally 0 is where it should be set. If you set it higher than the internal floppy's priority of 5, you won't be able to boot from the floppy except for non-DOS disks.

Some true, some not true. If the priority of the HD is set to a higher value than the floppy drive, the HD will always be booted as the first device.

If a NDOS disk is inserted, this disk will not be booted either; you will have to enter the boot menu and select DF0: as you boot device no matter if you are using a AmigaDOS disk or a NDOS disk.

[Merc]

doctorq wrote:

If a NDOS disk is inserted, this disk will not be booted either; you will have to enter the boot menu and select DF0: as you boot device no matter if you are using a AmigaDOS disk or a NDOS disk.

Hmm, I was pretty sure I'd had NDOS disks boot even with my HD set to priority 5 at one point..  I had my system set up this way on purpose to prevent accidentally booting from DOS disks that got left in the drive.
Maybe the NDOS disks didn't boot either though, now I'm going to have to go try it