Problem booting from drive

[webmany]

I have a A1200 with 2 IDE HDs connected.  One internal and one external.  With both connected I can boot up and read data from both drives.  If I disconnect the external drive, it will not boot up.  I have verified that bootable is check on both drives, and I have tried C A A the 1200 after it is running incase it was a delay problem.

[Homer]

Hi, does it give any error messages ? How have you connected the drives to the motherboard ? A specific adapter ? Is it possible the software that uses the adapter is on the other drive  :-? Does the single drive appear in the early start up options as a bootable device ?
Good luck, and have a :pint:

[Anthomatic]

Is your Workbench partition on the external drive?

[motorollin]

Also please give details about how they are connected and jumpered. It may be that the internal drive is slave and the external drive is master, and some drives don't like being slave without a master connected.

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moto

[webmany]

Both drives are connected to the HD connector on the motherboard.  The internal drive is a 2.5" laptop drive with a long cable to connects to a 3.5" HD outside the case.  

Both drives have a full install of OS 3.1, so it did boot at one time.

The boot menu does show both drives and all partitions are set bootable.

I don't remember the ability of changing a laptop drive from master and slave, isn't it cable select?

This machine was recently purchased and I am seeing what I can do with it.

[Anthomatic]

Sounds like there's something missing from your internal drive that the Amiga needs to boot up. Maybe some start-up files were moved to the other drive for some unknown reason and the Amiga needs to look there?

What about trying with just the external drive connected and see if that works?

[Piru]

If you are using filesystems on RDB, make sure both HDDs have the same filesystems, and with same IDs.

[scuzzb494]

Hi

Sounds fascinating this. I would guess that the boot priority was using the 3.5" external, which is most interesting. Connect it back up then boot with two button mouse down and select the internal 2.5" to boot from. Also use the the trusty Workbench disk to boot from and with DOPus compare hard drives. Either a cable problem or as someone else said you have some files missing. Always an issue this cus HDToolbox keeps your drive info, and that just may be on the 3.5" disk.

By the way... get a buffered interface and IDEFix97 and you could strap a CD onto that system. Have fun.

scuzz
http://www.commodore-amiga-retro.com

[webmany]

It looks like the external was the original drive and the internal was the new drive.  What I think someone did was copy everything from the old to the new drive.  Looking into startup-items they both the same (starting items from DH0), so if I disconnect the internal drive, items do not start.

So I guess I need to find out if some files either did not copy or are damaged on the new drive.

[rkauer]

 Could be a naive suggestion: did you set the boot priority for the internal drive? +10 is a good choice, BTW.

[webmany]

Does the boot priority matter if it is the only bootable drive, like when the external drive is removed?

[Thomas]

Boot priority does not matter if there is only one drive.

Check what Piru said. It's the best explanation for your symptoms.

Bye,
Thomas

[orange]

have you tried setting internal HDD as "last drive"?

[scuzzb494]

Hi

Interested, why if he was booting from just one hard drive that the file system would matter.

Sounds to me like the second hard drive had something on it that the 2.5" doesn`t. Both drives worked before, so the only real issue is what is missing, given that nothing has changed.

scuzz

[motorollin]

scuzzb494 wrote:
Interested, why if he was booting from just one hard drive that the file system would matter.

If the internal hard disk uses anything other than FFS for its file system then the chosen filesystem (e.g. SFS, PFS, AFS) *must* be installed in the RDB of at least one installed disk. If it is installed in the external disk then either drive will boot since the filesystem will be available and the partitions will be readable. Remove that external drive and you remove the filesystem, and the partitions are no longer readable.

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moto