4xEIDE'99 adapter woes

[acottrill]

I installed a 4xEIDE'99 adapter tonight, being very careful,  much more careful than I am with pc's, as I can't just go down to any office/computer store and get more parts.  suffice it to say, I took extra precautions with static and handled all parts very carefully.

so upon completion of the installation I fired it up.  here is what I got...

HD led flashes
monitor flickers
power led flashes 4 times
HD led flashes
monitor flickers
power led flashes 4 times
and so on...

so I stirp it back down and reassemble the computer without the EIDE adapter.  same thing.

I then installed another 2.5" HD that is totally blank and unpartitioned and the machine boots to the screen that asks for a boot disk.

so then I reboot the machine pressing both mouse buttons to get the early startup screen and and check the boot options.  it lists DF0 and CC0. but no hard drive.

so...I pop in a game.  Ferrari f1 and it loads up and plays.  so I'm pretty sure the compuer is not completly fried.

did I smoke my first drive?

should I be able to see the new blank drive on the boot options screen?

does anyone else want to give this EIDE adapter a run to see if it smokes your drive? :-D

thanks for your help
AL

[motorollin]

Well you can't see hard disks in the early startup screen unless they have Amiga partitions on them. Try the first hard drive connected directly to the IDE connector without the EIDE, and see if it works.

--
moto

[acottrill]

i reassembled with the original HD.  same problem as with the EIDE controller.

[Thomas]

The orignal HDD has something installed on it which makes the computer crash. Perhaps it is from another Amiga with a more moderm processor. Or it does not have the file system stored on it needed to read the boot partition. Or it's just corrupted.

You should connect it to a PC and install an MBR on it (just to delete the Amiga partition table). But don't create partitions and don't format anything, or all your data will be lost.

Then connect it to the Amiga and run a RDB recovery program (e.g. RDB-Salv or RDBRecov) in order to recreate the partition table from the existing partitions.

Alternatively you could try to connect it to the second channel of the EIDE'99, boot from floppy or from another HDD and then run IDEfix to mount the original HDD. If you are lucky, it won't crash this time and you can use your favourite partitioning program (e.g. HDToolbox) to repair its RDB.

Bye,
Thomas