A4000 IDE trouble

[djkoelkast]

Hi all,

I decided to swap my noisy IDE and SCSI harddisks for two microdrives on IDE > CF boards. The boards work fine. Because I have to backup here's my current setup:

IDE drive master, the bootdisk
Microdrive/CF slave on IDE
SCSI drive, extra disk

When I put in a CF it all works fine, I can see it in HDToolBox, install it and after that nothing happend. So I went back to WinUAE and formatted it. After that it worked fine, but CF is not what I'm after, so I bought me two microdrives. I want to partition and format them but can't get them to work at all, HDToolBox never sees them.

Am I doing anything wrong here? Or isn't the Amiga compatible with this setup (I doubt that, I can even hook up a 80GB harddisk and use it fully, as this is already a Workbench 3.9 with all IDE extras on it, so it doesn't have the >4GB problem). Any tips?
The drives were meant to go in an iPod, so maybe I need to fix them on the PC first? I've looked but found only one FAT32 partition, but I may be overlooking things.

Any help is welcome.

[Thomas]

Try to format them with WinUAE as you did with the CF card.

Try to connect the CF/IDE adapter to the PC's IDE bus and check if the BIOS does recognise the microdrives. Perhaps the drives are not compatible with CF/IDE adapters.

[djkoelkast]

I think this means yes, it does support it.
And I know it's 8GB, I can always choose to just use just under 4GB of each, but I know the >4GB is not a problem in this WB 3.9 installation.

[stefcep2]

I could never get a CF and an IDE hard drive drive to work on the a same cable on my A4000. Others reportedly have.  It might be the adaptor and the A4000 IDE interface that don't want to play together.  If you have access to another adaptor, then may be try this?

EDIT:  It seems many CF adaptors are dual Master Slave adapters and will take up both Master and Slave roles on the IDE interface, even when there ia another IDE device on the same cable.  They won't work with anything else attached to the same IDE cable.  There are apparantly single CF adapters out there, and I'm trying to get one myself.

This *may* work:http://cgi.ebay.com.au/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=170451687849&_trksid=p2759.l1259.  I'm waiting for the seller to confirm.

[djkoelkast]

Finally some success.
I had the MD in a CF to SATA adapter, put that in a SATA to USB dock thing but it didn't really work.
Now I put the MD in the adapter, hook it onto a IDE to USB cable, set the drive in WinUAE as IDE0 and I was able to do all partitioning/formatting.
It's formatting the 1st partition now, I'll first do one, copy from the original IDE, then add the rest later.

At least it looks like it's working for now. I'll have a quiet A4000 finally!
Also the SCSI drive will go, I already got a SCSI ZIP drive working, so I can transfer small stuff from the PC easily.
And oh yeah, I'm going to use it on a daily base again

[djkoelkast]

So far so good.
Backupped everything to HD Images on WinUAE
Copied that to my new Microdrive (just 3 partitons, all under the 4GB mark because I did all this with the Install 3.1 disk).
Worked fine, put the MD in the A4000: nothing, not even in HDToolBox, so there might be a problem with the CF reader in slave.
No problem, just hook up the MD as only drive in master. Doesn't boot.

So I made a new Install 3.1 disk, booted it and it does find the MD, but the config is wrong, it's set to: UAE-IDE amiga.hdf 0.3
So click on DEFINE NEW and READ CONFIGURATION, here's where the confusion starts:

UNIT IS NOT A DISK (TYPE 7)!

Cylinders: 15501
Heads: 16
Blocks per track: 63
Blocks per cylinder: 1008
Park head: 15501

Size: -576608K (-563 Meg)
Supports reselection is on

I did something wrong, this is not supposed to be an HDF file, because it isn't, it was selected as harddrive, not harddrive image file. I did a format and then just:

copy dh0: mdh0: all clone

Was this wrong? Or well, what did I do wrong and why doesn't read config work?

edit: I found out I've done all this not on IDE0 but on UAE as hdd controller, might be wrong, so I seleted IDE0 for now.
This is a screenshot from WinUAE:



Now I'm kind of stuck
I'm happy I first made the hardfiles, because I won't have to hook up my IDE drive again for copying, so emtying the MD is no problem for now.
Maybe this is because it's an 8GB drive and WB 3.1 doesn't understand this? I'll keep on trying

Another edit:

Booting from the emergency OS 3.9 disk did the trick for now, now just find out how to get the data back on this drive