how to format an ide hard drive on A4000

[PMC]

lolof wrote:
It was just a jumper on the hard drive, it was set "master", I removed it and it wor well. I thought thas was correct, the hd was alone on the ide port but i remove the jumper and all is ok.

I only have a scsi cd player and of course a scsi card.
There is only a jumper on ID1 on the cd player. I thik its correct.

Wenn I introduce a cd, it doesn't mount on the workbench.
I thik miss a driver or somwhatelse.

@lolof

At least we're up and running now with the Hard Drive, you've got an OS installed thus far.

Sorry to go through this again, but you say your CD ROM is a SCSI unit mounted via a SCSI card?

I'm pretty much a SCSI virgin so other guys / gals here know more about it than I do, but you should see some sort of CD icon on the workbench if you insert any CD regardless of it's type.

Worst case scenario is a trip to PC World and shelling out twenty five rubs for an IDE CD ROM, but IIRC they don't fit in the A4000's case particularly well.

[SilvrDrgn]

blobrana wrote:
There’s another thread here on how to change the maxtransferspeed...

MaxTransfer is NOT a speed, it's a SIZE setting.  For IDE drives, it should usually be set to "0x1fe00".

[blobrana]

Hum,
of course.
tnx for correction.
And for future referance;
 The A1200 series machines ship standard with IDE drives. Commodore modified the drive setup utility, HDToolbox, to be able setup IDE drives, but did not change the setup defaults from SCSI drive defaults to IDE drive defaults. HDToolbox will list the drive type as SCSI when the drive is actually IDE.

The particular SCSI setting which causes the most trouble for IDE drives is the "MaxTransfer" setting, which sets the maximum size of chunk of data that the system will try to exchange with the drive at a single pass. MaxTransfer is a size, not a speed setting. As such, when MaxTransfer is set too high, data transfer actually slows down, because communications between the host and the drive become garbled. When Maxtransfer is set properly, then the drive and the system communicate very smoothly, and much faster.

Commodore originally shipped the A4000 with Seagate ST3144A drives, which are IDE drives that can operate using the SCSI default settings, in particular the "MaxTransfer" setting, which is a figure of "0xffffff". Virtually no other make/model IDE drives can do that. Most operate well with a figure of "0x1fe00".