A600 update! - more help required....

[fitzsteve]

Right! I think I can help you

Ppill's comfy works just fine on my A600:

http://eab.abime.net/showthread.php?t=57259

As you can see here, so hopefully it should work on yours too!

For some reason the archive hansel75 Zoned for you had an empty (or corrupt) HDF, after restoring it with the files from Ppill's original release of Comfy I was able to boot without the 'Not a Dos Disk' error.

Do you have a copy of that Boot.adf on a real floppy? If not I can write you one and post it to you.

I can dropbox the HDF file for you, all you'll need to do is copy the HDF to your Fat formatted CF card (keep your ADF's in the root of the CF) and boot from the Floppy Disk, it loads just like below and you can use TSGui to write your Disks, as you can see it get's a bit tight on Ram after loading TSGui but I think I can free up some

[demolition]

Originally Posted by foob

i'm going to try this as a last-ditch effort. how might one do this? after a bit of googling i see Directory Opus is both an old amiga prog and an updated win version. which do you mean me to use?

Mount the HDF in WinUAE (as a harddisk) and the CF card as a directory. Then boot it up. If ClassicWB has been installed, you can then start DOpus from it. Open up the CF card on one side and DH0 on the other side and copy all the files to the CF.

[foob]

Originally Posted by demolition

Mount the HDF in WinUAE (as a harddisk) and the CF card as a directory. Then boot it up. If ClassicWB has been installed, you can then start DOpus from it. Open up the CF card on one side and DH0 on the other side and copy all the files to the CF.

ahead of you on this one, i the included dopus in the cwb version im using wont work (crying about some library missing) so im just finding an older version floppy and using that.



As far as having the boot.adf on floppy, no i do not unfortunately.i am going to try this other method first before resorting back to the royal mail, although i do admit i find it rather amusing how strangely keen people are on this forum to post stuff out to everyone. It feels like you're trying to keep snailmail alive.

[fitzsteve]

Well I can confirm it works just fine:







I'd be happy to Email you boot ADF but the point is you have no way to write it back to a floppy hence to resorting to snail mail.

Anyway, just trying to help a fellow Amigan. Like you I was up till 2am last night

Not to mention the time spent today trying to solve your issue!

I learned a lot, so it's all good

[foob]

while dopus is copying stuff over (and taking its time), whats the golden number of mem i should be aiming for? assuming this method even boots up that is.

[hansel75]

Originally Posted by fitzsteve

For some reason the archive hansel75 Zoned for you had an empty (or corrupt) HDF, after restoring it with the files from Ppill's original release of Comfy I was able to boot without the 'Not a Dos Disk' error.

Hi, that hdf was blank on purpose to install whatever you wanted into it.

From Ppil himself- "a600_cf.hdf is a blank, preformatted hdf file. Use WinUAE to install any AmigaOS version that would work on a real a600, dump the adf file to a floppy and that's it."

It was basically a blank canvas to work with and didn't contain any WB files in it for copyright reasons. You could copy an activated CWB setup into it though and it should be fine, but i won't confuse matters anymore as Fitzsteve seems to be on track.

Han.

Edit- To save confusion, there also seems to be 2 versions of Comfy, the original version Fitzsteve linked to with the ADF writing utilities built into it-
http://eab.abime.net/showthread.php?t=57259
And a modified one meant for a normal CWB installation that Ppil made up for me, to enable booting a boot floppy that then redirects to the pcmcia card-
http://eab.abime.net/showpost.php?p=837609&postcount=28

[fitzsteve]

Ahh I see, I should have read the whole thread. It's certainly very useful.

The OP is trying other methods now so I'm going to step aside, I've done all I can :-)

[foob]

other method wont boot up on the a600, still doing its "nothing forever" thing, gets as far as bringing the workbench bar up, but never actually boots all the way in.

i'm starting to think i may have a faulty a600. only thing left to try now is getting the boot.adf that lets me boot using an .hdf file on the a600 but then as far as i can see ive literally exhausted every possible option.

[fitzsteve]

Did you disable all the extra components in classic workbench like I said? It may well be that there is a fault with the upper memory however with all the components in cwb and compact flash drivers you'll be running low, you need to go ahead and disable them, I wrote the steps in the thread earlier.

One thing you can try, hold right mouse button during booting, if using cwb you should get the boot menus and thus use cli like in my video.

[foob]

i think i did a few, but to be quite honest i don't know whats what or what i should/shouldn't be changing. its quite possible ive done it completely wrong.

[fitzsteve]

I'm going to try on my A600 to boot an unmodified version of CWB GAAE from a Fat32 CF using Akira's boot disk, if mine boots we know you have some other issue.

[fitzsteve]

Okies, mine is going very slow - I think maybe there's nothing wrong with your A600, just that 1mb isn't enough to load Classic Workbench or there might be something in the Startup Sequence holding it up.

I'm going to try disabling the components as I advised you before:

Originally Posted by fitzsteve

I think the reason it is taking so long to load is A) PCMCIA is very slow and B) you're running low on Ram.

If you load up your Classic Workbench install in WinUAE, disable the extra components such as the dock bar this will save you some valuable memory:

Right Click on the Workbench Bar then Choose 'Workbench>Settings'

A menu will pop up, select 'components'

Click on each of them one at a time and disable them all except the two that relate to Icons.

Next Put Away all of the Icons on the Workbench except the actual Disk Partitions, Ram Icons and CLI/Run Icons.

Now try again with the CF in the A600, you might be surprised with that extra Memory you save you might A) Boot a lot faster and B) have enough free Ram to load TSGui (System>Programs)

TSGui like EasyADF can write ADF's back to Floppy Disk

You will need to do this in WinUAE since we can't boot fully into GAAE on the real Amiga.

I'll report back if it helps!

After a few minutes my A600 still isn't doing anything so at least we can replicate your issue

[fitzsteve]

Hmm, it seems like even with the components disabled it's still very slow to load, I'm starting to think there is something in Classic Workbench that doesn't like Akira's boot Disk, I put a standard Workbench install and it booted really fast!

It shouldn't be a Ram issue anymore because we know there should be about 600k free after booting from my previous tests.

I'm going to leave it for a little while and see if it boots, it's been a few mins already so not holding up hope.

You're going to need to install Workbench 2.1 with ADF's in WinUAE from scratch and then install everything you need to write ADF's, unless we can figure out what the hold up is

Anyway, at least you can be pleased to know there's nothing wrong with Miggy!

Edit!

WoooooooT

It booted, after about 5 mins so at least it's faster after disabling the components!

@Thread - Anyone have any idea what could be holding up the booting? I have 0.5mb free Ram after I get into Workbench so lack of Ram isn't the issue!

Thanks in advance...

[fitzsteve]

I've narrowed down the problem now, it seems to be related to the size of the CF card, 300x Verbatim 2gb CF is slow as a dog yet my old Sandisk 1gb (riddled with block errors) is really fast.

I guess if you want to run an OS from PCMCIA on an A600 you need a smaller CF card, <1gb is ideal.

The overall solution therefore is to mount it on the internal IDE or get a smaller CF

Glad I figured that out, it was driving me mad

BTW it didn't work at all with my 4gb CF's, I don't have any smaller than 1gb to test.

I sent you something on PM that might help a bit, but it's still slow booting on the larger CF

[foob]

i'm going to reply to the PM here just so theres a record for future people going through what i have.


Given what we now know about the cf cards, what do you think would happen if we used say, gparted or something, to resize a 4GB CF card to 1GB? id rather it just worked for the minute and order the correct size card later.

While i understand 4GB cards can have different tech than stuff smaller than 2GB, but at the end of the day, if the 4GB works, just slow, then it seems to me that its the amount of space the CF card has that the emiga is struggling with, not the hardware itself (although it could be 50/50). Mayve you could resize a 4GB card into a 1GB partiion (and threeGB of unused space, as i doubt the amiga can get its head around a multiple-partitioned CF card) and then see if that loads any quicker? for the minute im just trying this .zip, no luck as of around 5 minutes.

[foob]

just a quick addition here, were getting somewhere i think.... although it took a while, that has actually booted up. So now at least we know we can tinker with a WB and get it to boot. SO right now im gonna try transgui to write an adf and if not, install easyadf from m disk and see if i can get it to write an adf that ive already put on the CF (boot.adf)

[demolition]

Remember that you can plug the CF card in and out while the system is running to transfer more files. Just don't do anything on the Amiga while it's out since it needs the files on the CF card to work. It should be ready again within a second after you plug the card back in.

Edit: It could be possible to make a smaller partition on the CF card. Maybe that will help, however I have a 2GB card that I use for file transfers and it is plenty fast when mounted with FAT95, so it could be the card itself.

[fitzsteve]

I think the problem is we're using the card as a system drive, maybe somehow this slows the system down the larger the card gets? I really don't understand it to be honest. I always found 2gb Cards on PCMCIA to be acceptable for file transfer, but I've never used them in this way before.

I'm not able to delete partitions on my CF's for some reason, even logged on as Administrator so I can't test the theory of smaller partitions but maybe it'll help

At least now you can boot into something and write ADF's so we're part way there even if you do need to make a cuppa whilst you wait

[foob]

well firstly, with the card at 4GB it couldnt get tsgui to load, it would just stick on "attempting to load tsgui". i can only assume it was just being slow and grew impatient with it.

I resized the partition to 1GB (using EasUS partition manage, free). and it doesnt seem to have had any effect on the boot times, but im still waititng for it to boot into WB now so i dont know what effect if any its had on the main operating speed of wb.

[fitzsteve]

It's certainly a strange issue, I wondered if it was to do with the 2.0 Rom.

I'm testing another A600 with 3.1Rom, it also has 2mb Chip Ram and Kippers 4mb Fast Ram and this 2gb CF is still slow on the PCMCIA when booting with the Boot Disks

One thing I did notice, the smaller CF's when you format them have much smaller Allocation Unit sizes, could it be this?