Bypassing the insert floppy screen in 3.1?

[Marco]

Hi all, I've had my 1200 running 3.1 off the hdd for a while now, but it's rather annoying having to ctrl-A-A every time I boot from cold.

Is it possible to bypass the purple insert floppy screen and just have the Miggy boot straight into Workbench? I checked my boot options in the startup screen, it lists 5 devices, DF0 (the internal floppy) - priority 5, CC0 (it calls it carddisk but I dunno what it is) - priority 3 and DH0 (my main partition) - priority 1. The other devices are DH1 and DH2, my other hdd partitions, both non-bootable. Surely since the hdd is given top priority it should just go straight to that no?

[PG]

Its your harddrive thats causing the problem.
Its to slow at spin-up.
Replace it with a newer hard drive and you will get rid of the problem.

[twizzle]

hi
in your early bootup screen all devices should be Enabled
DF0 PRIORITY 5    
DF1 PRIORITY -10  
CC0 PRIORITY 3    
HD0 PRIORITY 0 = Worknbench
HD1 onwards NOT BOOTABLE eg work- games etc

have you made sure your workbench partion is ticked bootable. ( in hd toolbox )
if all the above are correct  then it sounds like your hard drive is on its way out ie not spinning up.

unless someone can think of anything else to add??

[whiteb]

Its your HDD taking forever to spin up to operational speeds, which is a LONG time, 3.1 has the LONGEST of boot wait periods.

[Marco]

Thing is the purple screen comes up in around a bout a second from hitting the power switch, I've never noticed any long wait it just goes straight to that screen. That said the drive came with the Amiga and  (as you can probably tell from my sig) is very small and very, very old.

[Lando]

That sounds very odd.  Kick 3.1 usually searches for quite a while (up to 30 seconds) for a hard drive and then only displays the boot screen if it can't find one.  That the 'insert disk' screen appears after only 1 second suggests that it finds your HD right away but decides for reasons unknown that it doesn't want to boot from it?

[weirdami]

@Lando

I had the same problem with mine. It's all about the drive taking forever to spin up.

[Kronos]

..... or maybe the HD just acts like one of the "no-IDE"-hacks right after powerup.....


But as said, a new(er) HD is the way to go.

[Brian]

There's a hardware bypass for this issue. You should cut pin 1 on the hdd cable (reset signal). Then when you Ctrl+A+A it just reset the computer not the HDD aswell hence it will be ready to go on the fly. You might have already done this already or you reset doesn't spin down your hdd compleatly making it ready... anyway the above needs to be done for next thing to be possible.

TP9 and TP10 on the motherboard when connected together resets the computer just as when holding Ctrl+A+A (very handy when towering your A1200). With this knowledge it's just a matter of making a small surcuit that when power on the computer holds these two TP's connected for 2-3 sec... resulting in the Amiga being held in reset on startup but the hdd (as we cut the reset signal to it) spinns up and is then ready when the hardware resethold is released.

[motorollin]

Lando wrote:
That sounds very odd.  Kick 3.1 usually searches for quite a while (up to 30 seconds) for a hard drive and then only displays the boot screen if it can't find one.  That the 'insert disk' screen appears after only 1 second suggests that it finds your HD right away but decides for reasons unknown that it doesn't want to boot from it?

That's not odd at all. Kickstart probes the internal IDE interface and any SCSI interfaces at boot. If it finds a device it can boot from, then it will do so. If it hasn't found anything it can boot from after about 30 seconds then it tries the floppy drive, or shows the purple screen.

The fact that it almost immediately shows the purple screen indicates that it can find the hard drive, but the drive is not ready to be booted because it has not yet spun up. There are 3 solutions:

1. Press CTRL-A-A to reboot once the hard drive has spun up (which is what the OP is doing at the moment).
2. Aparrently, cutting pin 1 can help. I have never been able to get this to work, but it's worth a try as it won't do any harm to the drive or your Amiga.
3. Replace the hard drive with one which spins up quickly enough for the machine to boot from it without having to reboot.

--
moto

--EDIT
There is a fourth option, which involves creating a bootable floppy disk which sits in the floppy drive forever. The disk will be booted when you cold boot the machine, and the startup sequence makes the machine pause for a few seconds then reboots the machine. As long as your hard drive partition has a higher boot priority than the floppy drive, after it has rebooted your drive will have spun up and it will then boot from the hard drive. As long as you leave the disk in the drive, and you make the pause in the startup-sequence of the floppy long enough, then you should never need to manually reboot the machine if the hard drive doesn't spin up fast enough.