Hard Drive Won't Boot Cold

[Echo]

This is probably my fault for not running HDSetup on this disk I have which sets up the drive.

What I did was create all my partitions in hdtoolbox, copy everything from my zip disk backups, and rebooted.

It all runs great, till I power off. The Amiga doesn't find the hard drive when I next power on

It's not a spin up issue, as I've tried warm resetting after its spun up.

The only way I can activate the partitions again is to open that disk setup copy of workbench, and run hdtoolbox. All the partitions appear again and I can boot off them.

I'm thinking the other setup thing that I skipped creates a bootblock on the drive. I really don't want to reinstall everything, any way I can create this bootblock without partitioning/formatting again?

Thanks

[Severin]

Hmmm, HDSetup shouldn't make any difference IF your using the standard IDE interface, most HDSetup programs were for old scsi boards...

Things to check:

You have fastfilesystem (or whatever you use) install on the drives RDB (done with hdtoolbox)

You have set one partition to Bootable and of a higher priority than the floppy (greater than 0, 4 is the default)

You have the harddrive set as master (and on the primary IDE device if you have an ide-fix type dual IDE thingie)

If your using a scsi card I'll need to know the make / model and the amiga model your using...

[Echo]

Yep, all of that is checked.

It works perfectly after hdtoolbox has "activated" it after a power on - really baffling me.

[rgen]

Your boot partition is smaller than 4GB ?

[Echo]

Yep, just 30mb.

Work (hd1) partition is 1gb.

[thomas]

I'm thinking the other setup thing that I skipped creates a bootblock on the drive. I really don't want to reinstall everything, any way I can create this bootblock without partitioning/formatting again?

There is nothing like a boot block on a HD and I doubt that HDSetup will change anything.

But you can safely redo you setup if you do the following: open HDtoolbox, go to Install Drive and write down the number of blocks per cylinder and the number of bytes per block. Then go to Partition Drive and write down the start and end cylinder of each partition. After you redid the setup, check that blocks per cylinder and block size are correct, then enter the start and end cylinder of each partition manually. And magically all data reappears. As long as you don't format anything, no data will be lost.

Now my thoughs about the problem: I still believe this is a slow-spinup problem. Some drives spin down at each reset and come back up too slow (you should hear this). To fix it you can cut the reset line of the IDE cable. AFAIK it is the first one (that is marked red), but no guarantee ! Why it doesn't disappear when HDToolbox does the reset ? Because this reset is a software one. The peripherals don't do the reset. But when you reset by Ctrl-Amiga-Amiga it is a hardware reset and all devices follow it.

I made the experience that connecting another drive (CD-ROM or second HD) can help, too.

[Echo]

Severin has now kindly sorted me out over the phone. Turns out it was my boot priority of HD0, which was on 0. Setting it to 4 has cured the issue.

This still doesn't explain why activating it with hdtoolbox lets the drive boot warm with a priority of 0, but I'm just happy to have cured the issue

Thanks mate!