Alfa Power / Amiga 500 problem

[Everblue]

Hi,

I have just got an Alfa Power for my Amiga 500 (kickstart 1.3) and put a 15 gigs HDD inside (which I set with 2gig "ceiling").

The Alfa Power software detects the HDD with its proper name but whenever I try to edit the partition by deleting it etc, the Amiga freezes. Trying to format results in "error 21".

The HDD's icon also comes on Workbench with its name being "NDOS".

I have noticed that when I switch on the Amiga I get a blue screen and some garbage (for a few seconds). Also when the Alfa Power software is detecting the hdd, the screen flickers a bit.

Anyone got any idea what is going on?

Thanks.

[Everblue]

Bump

[Thomas]

Probably the drive is still too big. Depending on the firmware, the AlfaPower can only access 500 MB drives or so.

So make sure that you create partitions only inside the first 500 MB of the drive, for example one 100 MB boot partition and one 400 MB work partition.

Also make sure that FastFileSystem is stored in the HDD'S file system table.

And make sure that you only use FFS for your partitions (DOS\1), not International (DOS\3) or DirCache (DOS\5). And not OFS (DOS\0) of course.

And finally make sure that your Amiga's power supply is strong enough if the AlfaPower does not have a seperate one.

Bye,
Thomas

[DaMi]

Hello, I had not the same but similar problem with inserting 4GB compact flash card via cf-ide adapter. We will see if my solution helps :-). It seems that the native oktagon.device can address only something like 1GB of disk space. When the sum of all partitions went over this limit I always received the error 1001 message. I updated the alfapower’s rom (containing the oktagon.device) to version 6.4, but without solving the problem.

After many hours of reading forums and testing I successfully solved the puzzle :-). Here is my solution:

1. I removed the alfapower’s rom (it is recommended by OctaPussy’s manual)
2. Installed OctaPussy (supports TD64)
3. After cold boot I loaded from a floppy patched scsi.device (LoadIDE SYS:Extension/AT quiet reset)

I was not happy with this solution because of necessity to wake up the disk from floppy after cold start so I used another patch (DriveInit scsi.device 0 SYS:Extension/AT), that loaded the patched scsi.device directly into the RDB of my disk. Then I inserted back the original oktagon.device rom (amiga was turned off of course). After turning on my amiga500 happened this: a) old oktagon.device can access the RDB of the disk where is patched scsi.device (by OctaPussy), b) this scsi.device disables oktagon.device (I assume) and c) loads the disk under TD64 standard.

I successfully use this on amiga500 with KS1.3&3.1 (partitions size 200MB, 600MB and the rest) and amiga500+ with KS2.05 with same partition sizes).

[Everblue]

Hi Thomas,

"So make sure that you create partitions only inside the first 500 MB of the drive, for example one 100 MB boot partition and one 400 MB work partition."

If I try and create a partition, the Amiga crashes.

I have also tried using a Compact Flash (256MB) using an ide adapter - it was succesfully detected but it still wouldn't let me format. I also got error -21.

[Everblue]

By the way, any one has the link for the official floppy disk installation for Alfa Power? Mine is corrupted and it wont boot.

[DaMi]

Before I used the otapus, I was able to use ide disks but no cfs. I had problems with accessing rdb for pfs3 and formatting too.
Here comes the AlfaPower Installation Disk.

[Everblue]

Thanks!!!

[Everblue]

Ok, I downloaded that .dms file and wrote it to disk. Unfortunately when I run HDInst that comes on the floppy, it wont let me create a proper HDD partition size- and keeps giving me a size of 0mb.

Subsequently I downloaded the latest version of HDInst from aminet and replaced it... and voila, it worked!

So, problem solved, thanks everyone for help