2nd try: Error 4 in drive description problem, HELP!!

[Dragster]

Hi everbody,

In an attempt to give new life to this thread, I'll post what exactly happened with my Powerflyer problem... I hope someone has been through this before and tell me how to fix it.

Well, I had a hard drive crash, one of my scsi devices caused problems, that led me to do some tweaking on my system. I had two IDE harddrives working in NO SPLIT mode but I had to remove one of the drives and the powerflyer controller from my machine for a while, so I accesed the disks using normal OS 3.9 BB2 scsi.device (setpatch quiet) and hdtoolbox recognized the drive and all just fine (PF no split mode --> OS 3.9 BB2 seems compatible, not the other way around though) but as I removed one drive, hdtoolbox asked me to update the RDB because the other drive was not present anymore, so I did. After recovering my SCSI HD and all I put the controller back on my machine and connected the other drive again, powered it on and I found that the powerflyer recognized the hard drives in SPLIT mode, so the partitions were not recognized by AmigaOS. I expected it to see the disks in NO SPLIT mode as they were originally configured. Well, after seeing that, I went to the ata3 prefs program, selected NO SPLIT and clicked on "use" button, then I went back to hdtoolbox and the disk showed as one (24 GB) but hdtoolbox asked me to reinstall the drive (it didn't recognize the RDB written by hdtoolbox under control of the OS3.9 BB2 scsi.device, so it seems there's no compatibility on the OS39BB2 -- > PF no split mode way), so I clicked ok, and when hdtoolbox tried to read the disk configuration it showed a requester saying "Error 4 in drive description" and it does not allow me to read the drive config or partition it... I then clicked on the requester cancel button and well, that's where all my problems began. Everytime I try to set up the disk in no split mode I get this error... if I go back to OS 32.9 bb2 setpatch and read the drive config and partition the drive as it was originally, everything works fine... it's just under the ata3.driver control when I get these problems. Of course I want to recover my partitions and reinstall the drive as it was and leave it working with the powerflyer in NO SPLIT  mode but it seems impossible...

I've tried with older versions of hdtoolbox (even with OS 3.5 ones), same problem... I've tried hdinsttools from aminet and when I go back to hdtoolbox and read the drive's geometry I get the same error...

any ideas?  Please HELP!!!!!!

Thank you,

Dragster

[x56h34]

but as I removed one drive, hdtoolbox asked me to update the RDB because the other drive was not present anymore, so I did.

I think this is where your problem most likely occured. How important is the lost data? If I were you, I would reinstall everything and make sure that I have the latest PowerFlyer drivers (contact Elbox support for it).

Another possibility (try this first) is that somehow your PowerFlyer config files got corrupted, and in that case delete everything from your ENV: which is PowerFlyer related, remove the Startup-Sequence PowerFlyer lines, and reinstall the PowerFlyer setup software. Afterwards, while rebooting hold the left mouse button in order to get to the early ATA3Prefs menu. Change from Split to No Split there. If you can't (ghosted option) let the system boot and then change it from within OS3.9 and click Save, then reboot again, and all should be fine.

Of course, if the Hard Drive won't listen at all if connected to PowerFlyer, your best bet is to back it up fully, without it being connected to PowerFlyer (only the on-board Amiga IDE interface), then reformat it, connect it to PowerFlyer, and fix the messed up/corrupted RDB. You may need a 2.5 -> 3.5" converter for this though.

[Dragster]

Hi x56h4,

well, the data is not really lost, If reinstall and partition the drive under OS3.9BB2 with no ata3.driver loaded I can recover everything, I have the information of the partitions and mount files... it's just that I need to leave it as it was under the powerflyer control. I believe I have thge latest powerflyer drivers (6.1).  Already contacted elbox too but still no reply from them.

I've tried other things like booting from the emergency disk and running the ata3.driver from there to avoind corrupted env prefs files and such and I get the same result.

Thanks!!

[x56h34]

OK, if you can view the contents of the partitions through OS3.9BB2 without PowerFlyer drivers installed, then by all means move everything to a different drive (SCSI?) or back it up on a CD-R through your burner or something.

Afterwards, go to HDToolBox and slightly change your partitions in order to remove the old RDB layout which is PowerFlyer unfriendly.

Save the newly created partitions and reformat each and every one, and finally install OS3.9, update to BB1 then BB2, and restore your backup.

After that is done, install the ATA3.driver and see if it works (it should).

It may take some time, but I think that this method seems like the only SOLID solution for your trouble.

[NeRP]

Elbox needs to pony up and help you, Dragster.  It's not like you are some incompetent user who creates problmes for himself.

Wake up, Elbox.

[Thomas]

Well, I see some kind of deadlock here.

I assume the split/no-split flag is stored on the hdd in the first few blocks. That is where scsi.device stores its RDB. So the scsi.device RDB is invisible to the Powerflyer and changing the split flag will destroy the RDB for scsi.device.

What you'd need now is the drive geometry as presented by the Powerflyer. But this does not work because the driver returns unprintable characters or such in the drive description. This is most likely a bug in the Powerflyer drivers or perhaps in the hdd's firmware.

What you could try is to read the config using scsi.device and then insert the values by hand when connected to the Powerflyer. But I'm quite sure you will lose all data this way, because of the few blocks in the beginning which slightly offset each partition.

This is really a challenging problem :-D
But it's not unsolvable. Unfortunately I don't own a Powerflyer for experimenting, so I'd like to agree with NeRP.

Bye,
Thomas

[sundown]

Setting the PIO too high can cause problems. When I first installed my Flyer4000, I set the PIO too high for my older IDE drive. I would delete the prefs file & reboot. When the prefs window comes up, change nothing & OK it. After booting, open prefs & set for no-split, leave PIO at zero & see if it works. On my new drive, I set the PIO no higher then 4 for reliability.