A4000T multiple drives in "Boot Option"

[leericmarvin]

I have an Amiga 4000T with PhonePAK card, GVP serial card and Aradine 2 NIC card.
 
About a year ago the PS died and I installed another, it lacked sufficient power cords so I did not connect up 2 of the 4 SCSI drives then.
 
I recently added enough power cords and connect all 4 drives. I was having issues with booting and I pared back to one drive. In the process of testing I'd try booting on the other drives.
 
By holding down both mouse buttons at boot, it enters a "Boot Options" menu. The single drive is listed multiple times. The drive name is: SG3.9-3 The multiples have a ".1", ".2", etc assigned to their names. All 1-7 scsi id's are filled/listed.
 
I have to select the correct drive from the "select boot device" menu and disable all the "ghost" drives from the right one to boot up correctly.
If I do not, the computer boots to a CLI and prompt of "Please replace volume SG3.9 in any drive".
 
When I do boot successfully and run the HDToolsBox in the Tools folder, this app shows the real drive and all the "ghost" drives. If I enter one of them and change the boot priority, it also effects and changes all the other drives including the real drive.
Thus, when I see options to remove, install drive(deletes data), partition drive, I fear changing or effecting a ghost drive could wipe out my real drive.
 
If I boot up on any of the other drives, while it will not boot all the way because of assignment issues, these drives will show up in the boot options as the only drives, no ghost entry's with them.
 
Why does my primary and most important drive show up with ghost images? How can I eliminate this without fear of nuking the primary drive?
 
OK, one more clue? I renamed drive from SG3.9-3 to SG3.9 and it now lists mutilpe drives by changing last letter "9" into "A", "B", etc, rather then appending a number.
 
I have been out of the Amiga arena for 10 years now, my Amiga has been running 24/7 now for 13 years providing PhonePAK answer machine services, and controlling plug and power modules in my home.
I have forgotten so much, please treat me like a newbie here.
 
Thanks,
LeEric Marvin

[motorollin]

Sounds like all of the drives contain a partition with the same volume and/or device name. I would try booting each one individually, rename each partition so they are all unique, and rename each volume (in HDToolBox) to something unique. You should then be able to boot from any of them.

--
moto

[Thomas]

Why does my primary and most important drive show up with ghost images?

This is a SCSI issue. Check cables, termination, jumpers etc. Make sure that the SCSI cable is terminated at both ends and only at the ends. Check the documentation of the drive if there is a jumper which makes it answer on all LUN requests.

Also make sure that there are not two drives with the same ID.

All 1-7 scsi id's are filled/listed.  

Are you sure that it's on all IDs and not rather on all LUNs of one ID ?

[leericmarvin]

OK,  I've made some progress.  I found a hand written note in my A4000T manual about the older HDToolBox being more capable then the newer. So I copied the DOS3.1 HDToolBox and it recognizes changes to the SCSI buss and prompts to save "changes" to the drive. Once in the app, I can cause a "change" to be applied to drives.  

I added a 2nd drive to the chain and the earlier issue returns. So I will attemp to boot on each one, one at a time and make sure names are all diffrent.

Thanks

Back later....

LeEric

[leericmarvin]

Success.   After all kinds of itterations, I finally resolved problem when I changed the SCSI id from 1 to 3.   This placed the drive on the "same side" of the SCSI chain as the rest of the drives.  The CDROM was #2.
 
 
Now on to the next step.  The CDROM drive's eject button is damaged.  I have two canidates to replace it with: Yamaha 6x4x16 or 8x4x24  R/W SCSI drives.  
I have AsimCDFS ver 3.10   Will this support theses?  I tried to install this software and the install program claims I do not have enought free space and fails to proceed.  I have plenty of space.  Using just 115MB on a 4GB drive.  
 
Any recommendations?
 
Thanks,
 
LeEric

[rkauer]

Reduce the partition size in the system. Always keep FFS partitions to under 2Gb.

[pyrre]

Reduce the partition size in the system. Always keep FFS partitions to under 2Gb.

I was about to comment this as well...
Ive had ghost drives showing up in my SCSI chain when i had partitions larger than 4 gig... The partition failed and erased all my data shortly after.

After som good advices from people here in a.org my boot partition is always the first one on a drive and never exceeds 1 gig. i think the boot partitions are 500meg or less on all my computers now.

I have never had any problems with my scsi chain(s) after that.

[leericmarvin]

Thanks rkauer and pyrre,

The two drives with 4GB partitions have been like that since 2004. But I never got around to pushing their limits, having only 110MB each on them. One drive is the primary drive and the other is a backup.
Sounds a bit daunting thou to re-partition them.  
OK, so I think I'll go with the 500MB partitions idea, so they will fit when I burn them to a CD.  

So, I guess the best approach here is to "nuke" the backup drive and set up 8 partitions, format them all and then backup up to one of them before I mess with the primary drive.

Then I'll boot on that backup.  But it's at this point I have found it so frustrating in the past, dealing with assign issues.  Any ideas or suggestions here?   Can I just rename the primary to something else and the backup to name of the primary before I reboot?

When I resurrected the computer back in 2004 after hard drive failure I got it up to a minimal state to run PhonePak and CyberCron/CyberX10 to control Radio Shack Plug-N-Power modules in my home.

I now want to get Ami back to her glory days and then back up everything on CDROM and to likewise backup all my Amiga floppy disks.   I am seeking to preserve all I have that I can.
Any advice/suggestions to this end are welcomed.

Thanks again,

LeEric

[leericmarvin]

How do you setup a a tag line at the bottom of a post?

LeEric

[pyrre]

Thanks rkauer and pyrre,

The two drives with 4GB partitions have been like that since 2004. But I never got around to pushing their limits, having only 110MB each on them. One drive is the primary drive and the other is a backup.
Sounds a bit daunting thou to re-partition them.  
OK, so I think I'll go with the 500MB partitions idea, so they will fit when I burn them to a CD.  

So, I guess the best approach here is to "nuke" the backup drive and set up 8 partitions, format them all and then backup up to one of them before I mess with the primary drive.

Then I'll boot on that backup.  But it's at this point I have found it so frustrating in the past, dealing with assign issues.  Any ideas or suggestions here?   Can I just rename the primary to something else and the backup to name of the primary before I reboot?

When I resurrected the computer back in 2004 after hard drive failure I got it up to a minimal state to run PhonePak and CyberCron/CyberX10 to control Radio Shack Plug-N-Power modules in my home.

I now want to get Ami back to her glory days and then back up everything on CDROM and to likewise backup all my Amiga floppy disks.   I am seeking to preserve all I have that I can.
Any advice/suggestions to this end are welcomed.

Thanks again,

LeEric

My setup is:
Boot partition:
500MB

Second partition:
1.5 gig

Third partition:
2gig

Fourth partition:
2gig


Dont remember the filesystem though....
It is rather new, and capable of handling large partitions.
The two 2gig partitions do not show up if i boot with no startup_sequence. But run setpatch and they show up at once....