SCSI HDD not seen unless IDE HDD connected

[motorollin]

Yes it is definitely 8.5 (the latest).

I did a clean install of OS3.9 on an SFS partition on the SCSI disk, without the IDE hard drive connected, and the machine now boots to OS3.9 from the SCSI disk without problems.

This is weird, as I didn't allow the machine to boot before, just booted with no startup-sequence and ran setpatch, so I don't see what the difference is. This is also a pain because I now have to get everything back the way it was  :-x

At least it works now! Thanks everyone for the replies and support.

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moto

[Zac67]

Just for completeness (I know this is settled): you can query a SCSI drive for its size with any SCSI tool (I remember SCSIProbe, SCSIInfo, ...) giving you the size in total sectors. For SCSI this is all that matters because on hardware level the controller addresses absolute sector numbers only, there are no cylinders, heads, sectors (optical drives and tapes usually supports relative addressing, too).

The geometry in HDToolbox is just a clutch because it was made for various hard disks (e.g. XT drive in A590). It does not matter one bit whether you enter 10000 cylinders with 10 sectors each or 100 cylinders with 1000 sectors, as long as the product does not exceed the number of total sectors.

(E)IDE drives do the very same with LBA addressing.

[amigagr]

motorollin wrote:
just booted with no startup-sequence and ran setpatch, so I don't see what the difference is.
moto

but the ss is not only setpatch it's a lot more. other patches/tools/drivers/ etc. i wonder what did you expect with the use of only setpatch.

[motorollin]

I think you misunderstand. I booted without SS, and ran setpatch (which is the first command in the SS anyway). After this, the machine wouldn't bot at all, so did not have an opportunity to re-run setpatch, or execute the SS, or any patches within it.

I've found out why it's working after reinstalling. Setpatch is no longer patching the kickstart version! The command in SS is just "Setpatch QUIET". The AmigaOS ROM Update is in DEVS:. It says it is patching with 44.something when I run setpatch. But after a reboot, the version is still 40.68  :-?

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moto

[motorollin]

Well, this is working now. I have no idea what was going on. I connected a Compact Flash -> IDE adapter with a 128MB card to the Amiga's on-board IDE interface and created an FFS partition, and then formatted it. I then copied the contents of my IDE hard disk to SFS partitions on the SCSI disk. Now the machine boots OS3.9 off the SCSI disk with just the CF card connected to the IDE interface. Kickstart and Workbench  version are also correct.

This is so weird, but it's working so I don't care. The CF card takes up no case space and makes no noise so it's not a problem. It's not bootable and I've hidden it from Workbench, so it won't get in the way :-)

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moto

[Jose]

I thought autodetect of drive parameters worked on IDE too. I've allways used the change drive option to autodetect the size etc., even with IDE drives. As long as you're using >= 3.5 it should work. 3.1 wont correctly detect drive sizes over 4Gb (as you all know...).