Amiga 2000 HD-problems.

[jethrobull]

Hi guys,
I hope you can help me, because now I'm stuck.

I recently decided to get my old Amiga 2000 up running, after 10 years in the closet. Surpricingly it worked fine (had to replace the battery of course).
My problem now is that I want to change the SCSI HD from the 200MB I had to a  Seagate ST52160N 2.1GB drive. Peace of cake I thought. But HDToolbox crashes when I tried to read drive information. I entered the values manually with the info from Seagates website and managed to initialise and partition the drive (100MB,450MB,450MB,1GB). Formatting the first 3 goes OK, but when I have formatted the last partition the 3 previous partitions appear as unformatted and can't no longer be accessed. Reformatting these resulted in the last appear as unformatted.
All this was done with WB/KS 3.1 rekicked from KS2.04.
I purchased Kickstart 3.1 hoping it would solve my problems (would have done that anyway).
Now I can read drive info with HDToolbox and it shows:
Cylinders: 2559
Heads: 1
Blocks/track: 1656
Blocks/cyl: 1656
Size: -2076280K (-2027 Meg)

For simplicity I now work with 2 1GB partitions (HDToolbox default).
But the problem is still there. Formatting one, the other one goes unformatted.

I read somewhere that a negative value of drive-size could indicate you exceeded some limit,
so I reduced the number of cyls until I got a possitive value like this:
Cylinders: 2533
Heads: 1
Blocks/track: 1656
Blocks/cyl: 1656
Size: 2096496K (2047 Meg)

But it makes no difference.
Still I'm not making any progress.
So I hope now that someone else is using this drive or have any ideas what's causing this.
My system is:
Amiga B2000-CR Rev 6.2 motherboard
A2091 scsi-board rev6.6 ROMs
A2058 8MB ram expansion board
Microway AGA-2000E Flicker Fixer
X-Surf II network adapter
CD
Kickstart 3.1
I'm booting from WB3.1 Install disk

[shaf]

Jetrobull,

I think your problem is with the A2091 ROMs. The 6.6 ROMs didn't like anything over 2 GB. If you can get a 7.0 ROM upgrade it migh help, or even better the 6.0 GuruROM for the A2091 which is what I use.
 I think Softwarehut still sells both.

Cheers

Shaf

[jethrobull]

Shaf,
Thanks for paying attention to my problem.
After reading your reply I tried the following:
1. I partitioned the drive and left a bit of it unpartitioned from about 1.9GB and up.
2. I downloaded from Seagate a tool called Seatools Enterprise Edition. With it you can reduce the capacity of a drive to whatever size. I set it to a good bit below 2GB.

Nevertheless, none of this did change anything. So I don't know. Maybe I go for the ROM upgrades you suggest or maybe I buy me a Buddha IDE controller, the price is almost the same.

[JimS]

I agree with shaf on this, except for one thing. I believe the size limit of the 6.6 ROMS is 1GB. I've run into the same problems getting some 2.1 GB Seagates running on my old 2000. I don't think partitioning the drive to 1gb will work either. I tried this too... I'm not sure about that Seatools program, you could try setting the drive to 1GB and see what happens. I found that the 2 500meg drives I already have gives me more space than I need anyway. Amiga isn't bloated like M$  :-D

[jethrobull]

Yeah, that's it!
I used Seatools to lower the capacity to just below 1 GB, and now it works as it should. Seems a waist though to use only half of the drive, but for the moment I don't bother much since I have 4 of these beasts.
So now I have one mounted inside my A2k, and another in an external cabinet that I will use for easy file-exchange with my WinUAE PC.
Thanks a lot to both of you, shaf and JimS, for leading me in the right direction.
JB  

[JimS]

Cool... I may have to try that Seatools program. I've got two 2.1 gig drives salvaged from an old SUN box. It would be nice to replace the 500 MB drive in my file transfering external case, at least I'd be able to transfer a CD's worth of stuff in one trip.

[BoingBoss]

6.6 boot ROMs = up to 1 Gig
7.0 boot ROMs = up to 4 Gigs
The 7.0 ROMs also corrects problems with some Seagate hard drives.  A Quantum hard disk out of an older Macintosh would be better then the Seagate.