Another FW hard drive/UAE question
 

I have a 20GB 2.5" drive that I'd like to format and set up for an A1200. It's currently in a firewire case attached to an Intel iMac. The iMac dual boots into Vista, where I have WinUAE/AmiKit installed. The FireWire drive mounts perfectly in Vista and in WinUAE/AmiKit. However, I can't format it in UAE, and I can't add it in WinUAE's configuration.

Thanks to other posters, I set up both WinUAE and AmiKit to run as administrator, which enabled the "Add Hard Drive" button on WinUAE's Hard Drive page. However, the FireWire drive does not show up in the drop down menu, so I can't add it. The only drives that do show up are the Vista and Mac partitions of the internal HD and the internal optical drive. Which makes me think external drives are not going to be recognized.

Do I still need to use the "-disableharddrivesafetycheck" option when starting WinUAE to add the FireWire drive, or does it need to be formatted in a nonFAT format before adding it? Or is it simply a matter of it being connected via FireWire?

Check if the drive is shown in Windows' Disk Management (right click on Computer, select Manage and then Disk Management). If it does not show in Disk Management, then WinUAE cannot see it, either. IMHO it is unusual to connect a HDD through firewire. Are you sure this works with Windows ?

Click "Add harddrive" button, exit WinUAE. Attach winuaebootlog.txt.

It's not as unusual to connect a drive through firewire on a Mac as it would be on Windows. Part of the installation procedure for Boot Camp-enabled booting does install appropriate drivers for the Mac hardware to operate on Windows.

The drive shows up as D: under My Computer, and it appears on the desktop of the emulated Amiga, but I didn't know about the disk management thing. I'll check it when I get home. Thanks!

If the drive has been touched by a PC-like computer, no matter if FAT or anything else, you have to use the command line switch. Only if Disk Management thinks it is uninitialized, then WinUAE would access it without the switch. (Do not initialize it !!)

But anyhow, WinUAE should show the drive. It would only refuse to use it.

Well, the FW drive shows up in the disk management window. I tried deleting the volume so it would be unallocated, but it didn't work.

I've attached the bootlog.txt file as Toni suggested.

Thanks for your help!

Dan

Problem solved, but the solution isn't encouraging right now....

I booted into Windows and and turned on another external drive connected via USB 2. I had no problem with it being recognized by the Add Hard Drive drop-down. Popped up first time. So, Thomas, it looks like your call about FireWire was correct.

Unfortunately, the USB enclosure only accepts SATA drives. So it doesn't do the drive I'm trying to format a bit of good, until I can get a proper enclosure.

One thing in Vista is you need to run WinUAE as and Administrator or it will not let you directly access the drive from WinUAE.

Thomas is awesome!

I guess this is the "missing" drive?

// MessageId: ERROR_INVALID_FUNCTION
//
// MessageText:
//
// Incorrect function.
//
#define ERROR_INVALID_FUNCTION 1L

Weird.. I guess yet another workaround needed..

I worked as a member of the design team on most of the HDD->Firewire chips made in the last 6 years! Chances are that enclosure has a chip I worked in inside it. If it is PATA->FW then it is likely to be an Oxford Semiconductor 911+

Let me know which enclosure it is. If it is one of ours I can try it here.

There is always a chance it is an early one with a bug in the firmware :rolleyes

I guess it is driver "feature" (Is it Windows built-in firewire driver or some 3rd party one?). Perhaps IOCTL_DISK_GET_DRIVE_LAYOUT isn't required feature or something like that..

@Alex,
I got the enclosure from Other World Computing... OWC Mercury On-the-go. It is an Oxford 911+ chip.

@Toni:
Further testing narrowed the issue down to the FireWire 400 enclosure. USB 2.0 and FireWire 800 enclosures worked fine. The drive you singled out is my backup drive, the FireWire 800.

You also parenthetically asked about the driver being an official Windows FireWire driver or a third-party one. Since I set up the dual-boot using Boot Camp, the driver came from Apple.

Thanks for everyone's help on this.

Just checked winuae sources and there is already check for ERROR_INVALID_FUNCTION (=just skip MBR partition check)

Original problem is caused by something else...

It looks like I have the problem solved for the time being. I borrowed a 2.5"-3.5" adapter from IT (I wish I known they had one from the beginning), and hooked the drive up through an fw800 enclosure. It showed up in the list, HDToolbox recognized it, and there are plenty of walkthroughs to help me the rest of the way.

Thanks, Toni, Thomas and Alex for your help.

Dan