Amiga 3000 6 GB SCSI hard disk inside - starting from scratch

[ceaser]

Hey. I self-taught myself on the Amiga 4000, but I really never mastered how to properly prepare a hard disk for the Amiga. On this Amiga 3000, I've been using Workbench 3.1, and for some reason when I partition the hard disk it just does not work correctly, and will not install Workbench onto it. Should I use Workbench 2.04? I tried changing drive type then low level formatting then it says you're supposed to verify and do something with the bad blocks but I can't figure this out. No matter what I keep getting an unusable hard disk.

Help! Which steps would you take to get it going?

Also, I don't even remember if it was a PC thing or an Amiga thing, but I can remember the name of this program called Partition Magic. Should I use some 3rd party partitioning software like that?

[lost_loven]

Make sure its properly terminated and do 2 gig partitions and try formatting it.. 3.1 is far better than 2.04. Used quick format.. Low level takes to long and WB doesn't see or like anything above 4 gig for the first partition. There are other file systems you can use to use greater than 4 gig partitions like smart file system . I would try this first.

lost

[thomas]

Change drive type, define new, read configuration. Then return to the main menu and go to partition drive. Do not touch the low level format button and the bad blocks button.

[lost_loven]

nice reading

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amiga_Fast_File_System

lost

[ceaser]

That is a good read. I just remembered that when I was messing around in HD Toolbox it said something about L:FastFileSystem being gone. This version of WB 3.1 came with an A4000 and the write protects have never come off these originals, so I doubt virus would have anything to do with it. Has that ever happened to anyone: where you got a message about FastFileSystem (or .lib or however the file is labeled) when you were trying to redo a smaller hard disk or do a disk from scratch? By the way I think this hard disk is only about 600 MB so sorry about the title of my post being partially wrong!

[thomas]

Has that ever happened to anyone: where you got a message about FastFileSystem

FastFileSystem is only on the Install disk. If you boot from the Workbench disk you always get this message.

Please read the message carefully. It does not say that the file got deleted. It just says it cannot be found in the L directrory of the disk you booted from.

By the way I think this hard disk is only about 600 MB so sorry about the title of my post being partially wrong!

Please be aware that HDToolbox cannot handle numbers bigger than 4096 MB. So it might well be that your disk is 6 GB, but HDToolbox just says 600 MB because it got an overflow when calculating the size.

You can calculate the real size of the disk by multiplying Cylinders * Heads * Blocks per Track * 512.

Please also be aware that AmigaOS cannot handle hard drives bigger than 4GB. So do not create partitions outside the first 4GB of the drive. If you've got a 6GB drive, you need to leave 2GB at the end empty (without partitions).

[ceaser]

You can calculate the real size of the disk by multiplying Cylinders * Heads * Blocks per Track * 512.

^^

When I do a read configuration, it gives me cylinders and heads and all that. It also won't write the configuration directly to the disk. I had to make a copy of my Workbench 3.1 Install and take write protect off it. It only writes the disk config to there. I don't know if it's even reading the right data. At this point I would be happy if it'll give me some hard disk. I don't care if I can't get 6 GB worth.

Quarterback Tools 5.0 = no help
DiskSalv = no help

I have tried everything in DiskSalv. It's so bad, the disk doesn't even show up in boot options. I partition it. I get it to install Workbench on this little section of the disk. I turn it off. Next time I turn it on (when it loses the data left in RAM I guess, I'm not an expert) the hard disk does not even show up in boot options when I press left and right mouse.

Before I made my post I did a low level format, because I thought I could figure this out, but I can't. I mean, I thought I'd just start from scratch, because I didn't like the way he had it set up. Now, I have a broken computer. I'm going to sell it I guess.

If anyone knows what I'm doing wrong let me know please. It'd be nice to have my A3000 back. I guess I got 1 hard disk left that came with this card. It's 250 MB Amiga formatted. If I can't figure this out I'll have to use that. But this is crazy and ridiculous. It should not be this hard to make a hard disk work!

Also, I apologize because I've been in this situation countless times. I'm a decent PC technician and anyway, not worth saying but.

SPECIFICALLY, NO MATTER WHAT I DO, THERE IS A VOLUME CALLED "WORK" WHICH SHOWS UP WHEN I DO HDSETUP IN WORKBENCH. IT SAYS "VOLUME WORK IS INVALIDATED" AND THERE ISN'T ANY WAY IT WILL VALIDATE BY ME LEAVING THE COMPUTER ON FOR A LONG TIME, OR USING DISKSALV. WHEN I TRY TO IN DISKSALV IT IMMEDIATELY ERRORS OUT OF MEMORY. sorry for caps too but this is the most important part of my post. I am not enough of an Amiga expert to describe, but it's like phantom partitions are left behind!

[thomas]

HDToolbox keeps a collection of different drive definitions and saves it to a file names "drive definitions" in the same directory as it was started from. You can keep the floppy disk write protected if you change the file name for example to "ram:drive definitions" or if you drag the HDToolbox icon to Ram Disk and run it from there. The collection is not used by anybody anyway.

HDToolbox is used to manually initialize the drive and create partitions. HDSetup is used to do it automatically. You use one of them, but never both. The automatic setup done by HDSetup is for very small harddrives. It cannot be used for drives larger than 4GB. So do not run HDSetup. Use HDToolbox only.

The order of buttons in the main menu of HDToolbox is in no way related to the order of actions you need to do. Use "change drive type", then "partition drive" and finally "save changes to disk". Nothing else is needed.

As I told you before, you cannot use partitions which reside completely or partially outside of the first 4GB of the drive. But you can create them. HDSetup did it for example: it created an 8 MB Workbench partition and used the rest of the HDD for the Work partition. If you format this Work partition, it will overwrite the partition table and the first partitions. That's the reason why everything is gone after you reboot the Amiga.

Big partitions need a lot of RAM to be formatted. If you don't have enough RAM, the partition will remain invalidated. Make smaller partitions if this happens.

To summarize:

1. drag HDToolbox to RAM disk, then run it from there
2. do not low level format
2. ignore the message about missing fast file system
3. create small partitions and leave 1/3rd at the end of the drive empty, for example one 500 MB boot partition and two 1700 MB partitions for applications and data.
4. do not run HDSetup
5. reboot and format the new partitions. Select one at a time and choose "format disk" from the menu. Use Quick format only. Complete format is not necessary.
6. run the install script from the Install directory.

[ceaser]

heh just wanted to thank you. amazing that i was simply not using HDToolbox properly. Yes, this is for sure 6 GB on this hard drive. There's going to be some formatting time here, but I think I'll be out of the woods. I'll be sure to let you know as soon as she's done, but I think this is what I need to do!

Yep. Did it like you said and it's back now! Time to hookup the external CD-ROM and get OS 3.9 on here. I am pretty sure it has 3.1 ROM.