When FastATA goes wrong - how best to recover?

[guest7146]

Morning all,

This Morning I gave my pristine desktop A1200 a bit of an upgrade with a FastATA from Elbox.  I've used these upgrades before in my tower systems.

After installation of the hardware and boot-up into OS3.9, I installed the software and ATAPrefs was kind enough to tell me the best setting for my hard drive (an AmigaKIT compact flash) was PIO4.  Happy with that, I went along with its suggestion.

The system continued to work fine with that setting while it was still booted (perhaps PIO4 setting isn't introduced until reboot?) but when I tried to reboot, the system became non-booting and the CF card was no longer recognised as a DOS disk.  In an attempt to recover the situation I tried the following:

1:
I tried to boot up on an emergency floppy in the hope that I could get into my CF and turn the PIO down but unfortunately the CF was still not recognised (mounted as NDOS).  

2:
I also tried holding the left mouse button down because apparently that gets you into ATA3 Prefs.  But of course, ATA3 driver needs to run first and if the HD is not being recognised you can't get into it.

3:
Tried booting with no startup-sequence in the hope that the drives would be recognised before ATA3 driver is started.  No joy.

4:
I admitted defeat and took the FastATA back out, put the CF back onto the standard IDE port, booted back into workbench, manually uninstalled the ATA software (and removed the startup-sequence entry), then reinstalled the FastATA hardware, rebooted the system, re-installed the software, and this time turned down its suggestion of PIO4 in favour of PIO3.  Now the system is working fine.

MY QUESTION:

Is there an easier way to recover the situation if ATA3 driver isn't able to use the HD? I'd like to try pushing the setting back up to PIO4 to see what happens but I don't want to do it if it means I'll be ripping the hardware back out - those Amiga sockets don't take kindly to repeated insertions.

Cheers all,

BH.

[paul1981]

This sounds odd. What partitions do you have on your CF drive? What brand is the CF drive? Without ata3.driver running the FastATA should act as a normal A600/A1200 IDE port. Maybe it isn't doing with your particular CF card... that's all I can think of at the moment.

[guest7146]

Thanks for the reply Paul,

My CF card has three partitions.  Work: 1.5GB; Games: 1.5GB; System: 500MB

I don't know what brand the CF card is because AmigaKIT have put their own label on it.  But I have no reason to suspect that the card is dodgy; it's working fine.  At the moment it's working with the FastATA using PIO3.

Regarding the driver, the problem I had was that once the FastATA could no longer read from the CF card properly (I am assuming PIO4 was too fast for the card) it wouldn't recognise the disks and therefore I could not get into the system to disable the driver.
That said, even when I booted from my emergency floppy (which does not have FastATA installed) I experienced the same issue.  Is it possible that the PIO settings are stored in hardware on the FastATA?

Brian

[Lurch]

The fastata acts like the onboard controller when the driver isnt running.

So if you boot with no startup-sequence the driver wont load and it will allow you to use the cfcard as if it was connected straight into the onboard ide controller.

You can then go to the s folder and use something like ed to edit the startup-sequence and rem out the ata3.prefs line exit ed and it will ask you to save the file.

Reboot and it will boot straight into Workbench as if it was connected to the onboard ide.

Very weird you couldnt access the cfcard when booting without a startup-sequence.

[paul1981]

Is it possible that the PIO settings are stored in hardware on the FastATA?

No, they're stored in the prefs file ENVARC:ATA3.Prefs
Maybe PIO3 is the maximum speed for your CF card? I'd settle for that, I don't think you have any hardware problems. Weird though how you did a reboot at the time and it was still NDOS. Was it NDOS from a cold boot?

[smf]

I would stay on PIO0 if i were using a CF card

[Thomas]

Is there an easier way to recover the situation if ATA3 driver isn't able to use the HD?

Your reaction lacks a bit of systematic investigation.

If you really had a driver problem, simply switching off the computer and holding down both mouse buttons to start without startup-sequence immediately after power on should have solved it. You then had access to the drives and could have disabled ATA3.driver without touching the hardware.

If that was not possible, you had a hardware problem. Probably a lose contact beween that FastATA and another component. You cured this by removing and reseating the hardware. Removing the driver was not necessary in this case.