Amiga hd issues winuae trouble and help required everywhere..

[Radical]

Basically i was setting up a new hard drive for my amiga 1200 plugged into my pc on an ide lead with winuae. I partitioned a quick small system drive in the amiga first. Moved it to pc, winuae picked it up all good, setup up my system fine installed some extra tools then made a second partition. Upon formatting that it froze. Reboot nothing.

Ooops.

Not a problem put it back in amiga to run wb install again and put a bootable partition on it when ooops my installer disk decides to fail.

Now im stuck.

Im thinking if i can get winuae to see it again then i can get my workbench back from backed up adf's and remake my installer disk also from my backup adf.

3 days and i still cant configure winuae to see my drive properly so now i need to ask for help as its beaten me..

Windows doesnt see it as it was formatted to amiga, but it is in the bios i was thinking format it as windows hd to get winuae to see it again but windows cant see it so i cant select it to format in either situation, would be grateful of any advice  :-?

[Piru]

Windows doesnt see it as it was formatted to amiga, but it is in the bios i was thinking format it as windows hd to get winuae to see it again but windows cant see it so i cant select it to format in either situation,

Windows must NOT see the drive. If you're going to format you must do it inside the emulation. Also, it's quite pointless to wait for the "full format", always choose "quick", it takes only couple of seconds instead of (potentially) hours.

[Radical]

And it doesnt, however people have formatted a perfectly good windows hard drive to amiga format before, im still stuck with an invisible drive that wont boot..

[adolescent]

You should always see the HD in Windows Disk Management (although, not in My Computer if it doesn't have a Windows file system on it).  Just don't let Windows write a signature to it, otherwise you'll have to run WinUAE with the -disableharddrivesafetycheck command line switch to be able to use it in emulation.

[Radical]

Windows cant see it. Winuae cant see it. The drive was formatted amiga when it locked up on me. Its non bootable now. I cant put it back in my amiga to reformat it as my install 3.1 is corrupt now. I had a bad day yesterday.
So now im screwed. The switch does not help matters unless i wanted to format my windows drive to amiga which i dont. I cant see my amiga 2.5 inch drive at all to format it in windows or winuae.

Ok just had another bash at it both with switch and without. Winuae can see the amiga hard drive and i can select it in the drop down menu as an ide drive. But when i start the emu it freezes on a black screen and wont load into workbench. Yes i have workbench disk in drive.

Ok so this is interesting if i boot it as a winuae drive it boots up into workbench from disk and i can see the drive in workbench. However hdtools in workbench cant see it so im unable to re-format a bootable partition.

arrrgh. this is nuts.  :-o

[da9000]

@Radical,

if you're still fighting with this HDD, I suggest you download MHDD (http://hddguru.com/content/en/software/2005.10.02-MHDD/), and you can then determine if the drive is gone or not. Although MHDD has a "zeroing" command, I recommend using a bootable Linux CD (ex: Knoppix) as it'll usually enable (U)DMA and you can zero the drive much faster:
dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/hdX bs=16k

Where "hdX" is the ide drive number (0-3).

Alternatively you can use a Mac and Disk Util to zero the drive.

Then try again to use it in WinUAE.

Good luck!

[Radical]

Ok thats a good little program will try it in a bit. Now i got a different 2GB drive that winuae can see. The only problem is its a windows drive so i cant format it for amiga unless i disbale hard drive safety. Everytime i try running the program in command with the switch winuae wont start or i get a cant find the program error i dont understand how imusing the switch wrong.
c:\program files\winuae\winuae -disableharddrivesafetycheck

[Radical]

*Update*

Wow a little playing around and i now have a 2GB amiga bootable drive in winuae ready to transfer to my amiga a bit more research and i will be ready. Need tio stop empty amiga drive clicking its annoying.

[da9000]

MHDD rocks!

As for the clicking Amiga FDDs, try these:

http://aminet.net/search?query=drive+click

"ShutUp" is my personal fave :-)