Amiga 4000 Power Tower

[Ellis]

I'm having a problem with my A4000 power tower.Setup:

A4000 desktop mother board and 18bmb ram
cyberstorm MKIII 060 64mb of ram w/ scsi 3
Picasso IV
Catweasel/Buddha- s class
Ioblix serial card
2 ide hard drives 3 and 6 gigs
24x cdrom ide
zip 100mb ide
2 high density floppies
3.9 OS

That's my system and my problem is I lost my boot partition;lost meaning hard drive crashed! Second, I don't have everything backed up properly.

In a nut shell the system I have is very hard to get back working properly ;because of all the exspansion. I will list all problems.

The system will not boot a visible sceen on SVGA monitor. I have a spare multi scan and can get a good picture.

I can get Work Bench 3.1 os installed but the hard drives do not working properly and don't show all the space on the drives. OS 3.1 can't see the drive over 4 gigs. I can't put os 3.9 until I get evrything working ; mostly the cd rom.

Cross Dos does not work because I can't read long file names ;unless I install some other programs fat95 or cross dos 7. This has been a big problem ;since I use a pc for internet and I transfer files via floppies.

Anyone, that has a system similar to mine or any solutions ,please help! The cross dos issue is my most pressing problem because I can't get anything off the internet to fix the problems.

Thank You
ellis                 :-o

[SHADES]

What I would do is make a WB partion on an old IDE drive that is not going to break the 4 Gig barrier. They are very easy to find and often very cheap.  Boot up on it as master set the boot prirority to 3 or something using hdtoolbox. No go fiddle installing CDFS or some other CD driver, even get one from the AMinet or use a disk filesystem like PFS3 which by the way, I think is just the cream of creams, it fully supports big drives, just load it into the RDB Rigid Disk Block again using hdtoolbox and make the drive bootable.  

Once the large disk is recognised, just do a strait copy of youw Workbench drive over to the big disk and away you go.

I had the same problem as you except I had only SCSI drives and no IDE. Try doing that on a fastlanez3 SCSI!! You can't load setpatch or any other sys drivers as they patch the scsi.device and Fastlane won't see anything!, My CD rom was SCSi also, but as you guessed, doing what I mentioned above soon got me going and I then upgraded to OS3.9

There is another way... if you can make a bootdisk that patches the SCSI.device for your IDE drives TD64 or something, you could then do all this without the need for finding a small drive. Anyway, there's a few things for you to try.

[Thomas]

First of all you actually *can* set up the large HDDs with OS3.1. It is not true that HDToolbox does not see the drives. Only the reported capacity is wrong (usually negative). But this does not matter. If you feel uncomfortable with this you can reduce the number of cylinders until the capacity is below 4GB. Then create a partition and install 3.9 on it. After that use the new HDToolbox to correct the number of cylinders (do not touch the other values or the partition will be gone).

For the file transfer I suggest to archive the long file names with LhA or Zip. The archives can be stored with short file names on floppies and when unarchived on the Amiga, the long file names are restored.

Finally some criticism: why didn't you try to repair your boot partition ? Why do you have only one boot partition ? Why didn't you keep the emergency disk you created during OS3.9 installation ?

Bye,
Thomas

[Ellis]

I have the emergency startup disk but i belive it's damaged. I also have another and i have had no luck on booting it.OS 3.1 is the only way i have been able to boot up and that is not easy either. I have to boot with no strart up and that leads to more problems installing programs.

I was able to get a boot partition of 3.1 and everything seemed to be working fine. Installing software was a problem; since the computer thought the hardrive was full but it was not! So i'm starting over with a new partition but i need croos dos ;so i can get some of these programs off the internet. I use a pc for internet but i will see if i can try what you suggested.

I'm the poster child for people who do not back up hard drives. I think i have learned the hard way.

Thank You
Ellis      
         :-?

[Thomas]

Installing software was a problem; since the computer thought the hardrive was full but it was not!

Stay below 4GB. Everything above is problematic and always will be.

I'm the poster child for people who do not back up hard drives. I think i have learned the hard way.

Oh, I do not backup either. From time to time I write the most important things (program sources, key files  etc.) to CD-R, but I have no backup of the entire system.

IMHO it is not needed. This is why I asked why you didn't try to repair your boot partition. There are several tools to do that out there. Even one written by me.

Also, when you are up and going again, you should create a backup of your boot drive. Just do a

lha -e -r -a -x a backup:workbench sys:#?

to another partition. It's not too difficult.

Bye,
Thomas

[SilvrDrgn]

Ellis wrote:
I'm having a problem with my A4000 power tower.

I have a similar Power Tower MK-II setup, not exactly like yours, but close - http://mikerye.homeip.net/about_my_computers.html.

Anyway, first thing - always keep your boot partition as the first partition on the HD, and always keep it under 4 Gig.  1 Gig is plenty!  Do this regardless of the version of AmigaOS you are running.  Even if you have OS 3.9 installed, it is not actually in use until the first SetPatch reboot that it does which puts in the patches for big HDs amongst other things.  Because of that is why you need to keep the boot partition under the 4 gig barrier - under 2 Gig is an even better idea.

Install OS 3.1 to the 1 Gig partition you created.  CrossDOS should work fine for you once you drag and drop the PC0 icon from Storage/DOSDrivers into DEVS:DOSDrivers and reboot (simply double-clicking on it might work, too).  Just make sure you use 8.3 file names when dealing with the files on the disks.  Download AmiCDFS from Aminet on your PeeCee, and transfer it over to the miggy.  Install that.  Then you should be able to install OS 3.9.

OS 3.9 can see and use drives bigger than 4 Gig easily.  After you get it installed, you can use its version of HDToolBox to set up your 6 Gig HD the way you want it.  Back up files back and forth between your two HD's as needed in order to get things the way you want.  Once you have it all set, I would recommend using one HD to back up the other.  Have a boot partition on each HD, with different boot priorities set in HDToolBox.  My A4000T has 3 boot partitions, all with the exact same files but different boot priority settings.  There's one on each of my three HDs.  If I have a failure of some sort, I simply boot from a different one by selecting it from the Early Startup Screen.  Every night I have a script run from EZCron that creates my "hot backups" on each HD.

[AJS]

Hi Ellis
Try your system without the Ioblix serial card.... I had nothing but problems with it on my system no matter what slot i placed it in, I went for a HypercomZ3 in the end and had no problems.
Sorry can't be of more help

Andy

[Ellis]

What are 8.3 filenames? I thought cross dos worked with all pc disk? I was thinking that because of the long file names I needed a patch for cross dos or update to cross dos 7. I'm seriously thinking of getting cross dos 7.     :-D

[Ellis]

I mentioned this earlier but I have not had this card(Ioblix) in my system in a long while. I really don't use serial ports ,anyway. I do not plan to either ,since I use my pc to do internet, but I would like to get it(amiga) on a network card,soon! The Ioblix really has not given me any problems ;because I do not use it, ever. I also have a ASDG serial card I used in my old A3000  desktop and I do not use it.       :-D