Installing OS 3.9, please help.

[ByteRyder]

Hi,

Please help me out.

I recently acquired an A1200T equipped with a Blizzard 68060-128MB but I'm having much trouble trying to install OS 3.9 on it.

I've created a boot emergency disk, however whenever I boot from the disk I end up getting a "invalid resident library" error, and after that WB freezes on a grey background.

It doesn't matter if I have installed WB 3.1 or 3.5 or an empty HD it always ends up with the same result.

I've searched on the forums for other people with the same problem, but it seems the solution to their problem doesn't solve mine.

Tried every version of 040/060 libraries you can find, copied workbench.library to the disk, changed setpatch versions, doesn't matter what I do it always end up with an invalid resident library error although it has 3.1 ROMS installed.

When I install OS 3.9 directly from 3.1/3.5 environment installation goes fine but when it reboots in the end it goes on guru error cycle but sometimes I get "Not a DOS disk on device HD0".

Could it be because I'm using SFS and OS 3.9 tries to load FFS? doesn't make sense to me.

I usually don't give up on problems but I've been trying to solve this one for like a month now and I can't think of anything else.

What can you tell me from your experience?

Many thanks.

[Jose]

The partition where you install it must not be over 2GB. Does it boot normally from the AmigaOS3.1 floppies ? Do you have zorro or other expansion cards on the system besides the Blizzard accelerator ? If so remove them, maybe some are causing the problem.
Are you sure the HD is ok ?
What controler are you using, IDE, SCSI ? Is the SCSI chain well terminated ?

Anyway, you should 1st better describe your system for us to be able to help you but those are the things I'd try given your simptoms.

[utri007]

I haven't ever created working emergcy disk, I belive that problem is that if you have more complicated system, all stuff simply doesn't fit to it?

It would require HD disk???

[mfilos]

What about Workbench 3.1? Does it work just fine?
It seems like the SetPatch is causing you issues (that most times in that part are due to wrong 060 libs).
You can try the libs I used on my BPPC060 setup which I putted on my Dropbox for ya: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/939939/060_Libs.lha

To troubleshoot it, you can install a stock Workbench 3.1, then install the 060 libs, then install Piru's WhichAmiga and check if it see's normally your CPU etc.
Also check if everything's stable and then move on to 3.9.

johnim made an awesome guide @ Amibay and EAB about setting CWB3.9 from scratch, which you can check out here: http://www.amibay.com/showthread.php?t=20315

[ByteRyder]

The partition where you install it must not be over 2GB.

Oh.. really? why? That could be the problem then, since I'm trying to install it on a 14GB partition.

Does it boot normally from the AmigaOS3.1 floppies ?

Yes, it boots normally from 3.1 floppies and I can now access the partition where OS3.9 went, just can't boot from it.

Do you have zorro or other expansion cards on the system besides the Blizzard accelerator ? If so remove them, maybe some are causing the problem.
Are you sure the HD is ok ?
What controler are you using, IDE, SCSI ? Is the SCSI chain well terminated ?

Anyway, you should 1st better describe your system for us to be able to help you but those are the things I'd try given your simptoms.

The computer is a A1200Towered 3.1 ROMS w/ Bliizzard 060-128mb + 4x Way IDE Buffered Interface + CDRW + 120GB 2.5 IDE HD, nothing else.

I don't think it's a problem with the IDE connections because I can access de harddrive from 3.1 floppies and the 3.9 emergency disk mounts the CD drive fine and only later I get the invalid resident library error.

Anyway if you're telling me you can't install OS3.9 on a partition bigger than 2GB that should be the problem :O?

[zipper]

Oh.. really? why? That could be the problem then, since I'm trying to install it on a 14GB partition.

Not could but is! The boot partition must be below 4 GB border.

[Thomas]

If the emergency disk says "invalid resident library" then it has nothing to do with partition size. The emergency disk boots from CD, it does not need the harddrive.

Make sure you have the right 680x0 libraries installed. You need a small 68040.library (ca. 700 bytes) and a big 68060.library (ca. 100,000 bytes).

Also the 4GB problem only applies to the internal IDE controller. If you have a SCSI disk and use SFS you can use partitions of any size.

[utri007]

4GB limit is a problem after is starting to be full. Though I don't know how it does behave as startup partition?

[Daedalus]

Oh.. really? why? That could be the problem then, since I'm trying to install it on a 14GB partition.

Anyway if you're telling me you can't install OS3.9 on a partition bigger than 2GB that should be the problem :O?

Well, it might not be causing the problem with the invalid resident library error - that's most likely your CPU libraries as others have mentioned - but it will probably cause you massive problems in the future, so best to nip it in the bud now. Basically, the IDE driver (scsi.device) and file system (FastFileSystem) which are the standard in the 3.1 ROMs and Workbench 3.1 cannot access hard drives above 4GB (and there may also be issues with partitions greater than 2GB in size), so to boot it the boot partition needs to be below 2GB. In reality a boot partition about 250MB in size is plenty. Once it boots, OS3.9 installs updated drivers, meaning the rest of the hard drive can be used, and can have larger partition sizes.

So, once your boot partition is less than 2GB in size, and is fully located below the 4GB mark, you can install OS3.9 on it and use the rest of the hard drive any way you like. If you don't follow those steps, it might look like it works for a time, but sooner or later data will be written to the wrong part of your hard drive, causing corruption or total loss of data on the entire drive.

[ByteRyder]

I finally got it running, the problem was the HD partitioning after all. I've made a 1 GB partition for workbench, installled it over 3.1 and voilá, Get boinged!

If I ever see an invalid resident library error again i'm gonna kill someone!

Thank you Jose, utri007, mfilos, zipper, Thomas and Daedalus for helping me out with this.