IDE Question

[nyteschayde]

I connected an Western Digital 15gb ide drive to my amiga, installed 3.9 fresh from the Amiga 3.9 cd and it began booting wonderfully. I even partitioned the first partition to 4gb and the remaining space into another. Everything was working great until I powered off.

Upon powering on, the machine continually crashed. I put in the emergency disk, booted, then it all worked again. The trick was the setpatch command. :|

Is there a boot loader or something I can install on the harddrive that runs this setpatch command? Basically I was wondering if there was a way that I dont have to boot from floppy the first time I power up.

I heard about the kickflash zorro card but even if I used that I need to flash a rom. I dont know if there is a ROM image that I can rekick that contains all the necessary patches.

Ideas?

[Thomas]

I even partitioned the first partition to 4gb

The boot partition must reside entirely inside the first 4GB of the drive. This includes the first two cylinders which cannot be partitioned. Also the display in HDToolbox is rounded. So if it displays 4GB it is anywhere between 3.5 and 4.4 GB. A single byte above the 4GB border causes your crashes.

Make the boot partition 500MB or 1GB. This is plenty of space and does not give you any problems.

The "boot loader" you mentioned is the AmigaOS ROM Update. It is loaded by SetPatch and installed resident in memory. Once it is loaded the entire HDD can be seen. But until then (from power-on to the call of SetPatch) all data to be read has to be accessible by the Kickstart ROM driver.

Bye,
Thomas

[Argus]

Are you sure you have a file called startup-sequence in the s: directory of your bootable partition?  The first line of startup-sequence should be c:setpatch.  Maybe you are also having a problem with the rom updates of 3.9?  You could try commenting out the rom update with the command SKIPROMUPDATES (or something similar) after the setpatch command.  There are instructions on how to do this on the 3.9 cd.

Edit: ah yes, do as Thomas suggests, a smaller bootable partition.

[nyteschayde]

Reinstalling now, I'll let you know how it goes. I was wondering if that might be a problem.

[nyteschayde]

Yep, repartioning it to 3GB instead of 4 did the trick. Thanks!!