ASIM-CDFS help please!

[tom16mm]

I have a very similar issue.

A1200 (OS 3.1, 030 accelerator) with a CF card adaptor (master) and ATAPI CD drive (slave). System boots off the card just fine, but the CD drive is not recognized by any of the devices bundled with IDEFix. Tried different drives, with no difference. The CF card appears as device ID 0.

Attaching the CF/IDE adaptor and card to one of my A4000T's causes it to hang on bootup. Could the CD drive be conflicting with the card/adaptor in some way?

[save2600]

Attaching the CF/IDE adaptor and card to one of my A4000T's causes it to hang on bootup. Could the CD drive be conflicting with the card/adaptor in some way?

Seems so. Seems as if the Adapter card does not like anything else hooked to it and it's not like you can change Unit ID's on an IDE drive to get it off of '0', which is the only unit number that wants to kind of 'work'.

I guess I could try changing the only other jumper on the back of the CD ROM to CS or Cable Select... not sure what effect that would have. It's appropriately set to Slave now and the internal CF Adapter is set to massa. lol

[tom16mm]

Just tried reversing the master/slave assignments (CF is now slave, and CD is master), to see if I could get the CD drive to show up at all.

It won't boot off the card, but booting off floppy and running Find Device with atapi.device gets the CD drive to show up, but not the CF card, so it appears that for some reason the IDE bus is only showing the master drive.

Any ideas?

[save2600]

There's a jumper or two on the CF Card adapter - but not sure what they are for (besides master and slave).

In ASIM_CDFS v3.7... it does not give you the option to change the device to anything but the default, which is 4. Anyone know how to change the UNIT number to 0?

[tom16mm]

I guess I could try changing the only other jumper on the back of the CD ROM to CS or Cable Select... not sure what effect that would have. It's appropriately set to Slave now and the internal CF Adapter is set to massa. lol

I tried that yesterday, with the same issue. Cable Select sets the drive on the cable's middle connector to slave, and the end connector to master (usually).

[save2600]

Okay - I think I have an idea on why this isn't working. I remember reading some time ago something about that $40 4-Way Buffered IDE expansion add on. Is this what we need in order to get more than 1 device working? And IDEFix goes hand in hand with that, but is practically useless on its own?  (unless you have >4GB single HD)

I really more used to working with SCSI on Amiga systems...

[Golem!dk]

There's a jumper or two on the CF Card adapter - but not sure what they are for (besides master and slave).

In ASIM_CDFS v3.7... it does not give you the option to change the device to anything but the default, which is 4. Anyone know how to change the UNIT number to 0?

Edit the mountfile.

[save2600]

Edit the mountfile.

LOL! Nice avatar ...  where's that hiding? In Devs? Just looked there and noticed there's no longer a scsi.device! WTF?!?

[Golem!dk]

LOL! Nice avatar ...  where's that hiding? In Devs?

It should be in Devs/DOSDrivers.

[save2600]

It should be in Devs/DOSDrivers.

Only thing in there is 'Pipe' and it can't be smoked.  lol

OHHHHHHHH.... you mean on the ASIM disk!

Okay... just edited the mountlist.cd0 icon and am now reinstalling. Any bets it still doesn't work?  :lol:

And of course, it doesn't!  :mad:  How and why in the heck does this thing insist the unit is 4 after changing the damn mountlist on the original disk?!?

[Golem!dk]

Check DEVS:Mountlist then, and if should decide to try the installer again, try and let it create a log so you can see where it put things...

Found my manual, check section 1.5 for a description of the installation procedure.

[tom16mm]

Can't help with the device ID thing, but I've made another discovery:

To see if the IDE bus can actually support two devices, and to rule out board issues, I connected two ATAPI CD drives to it as master and slave, and booted off floppy. The Find Device list for atapi.device shows both drives properly, with master as device ID 0, and slave as ID 1.

This all seems to point to the CF adaptor as the source of the issues. I'll see if I can find a normal mechanical 2.5" HDD, and see if it works any better.

[Matt_H]

Asim puts CD0 in Storage/DOSDrivers and mounts it manually in user-startup. It can't go in Devs:DOSDrivers because the AsimCDFS: assignments haven't been made by the time those get mounted.

That's the file you need to edit.

[save2600]

I did try editing CD0 in Storage to no avail. So I shouldn't need that 4 way IDE adapter? I believe I've exhausted all my options. Not a terribly big deal though mounting a CD ROM with only 1mb of Chip RAM. With the AsimCDFS software loaded and caches set to minimum, it wastes waaaay too much RAM to make anything else of much use. After 3.1 loads and the CD software, it was down to 550-600kb of memory! lol  

Ended up just putting a Slingshot and A2091 card back on her. While I don't have the proper cable or a SCSI CD ROM to try out, I'm confident that scenario will work should the buyer decide to give it a go.

[tom16mm]

I installed a standard 2.5" HDD in place of the CF card adaptor, and now everything works. CD drive and HDD operate with no problems, so it looks like the CF adaptor is at fault.

Would using a PCMCIA CF card reader be a usable alternative? If the the A1200 can boot from the PCMCIA slot, that would free up IDE for a CD drive.

[TheBilgeRat]

was wondering if anyone has a good link to the instruction manual, as i am having an intermittent hangup on boot sometimes with AsimCDFS.