Partitions not mounting...

[essence25]

I've recently partitioned an seagate 10gb (out of xbox) IDE drive on a A4000D. KS 3.0 Wb 3.0 with idefix97 and SFS filesystem.
I was able to partition the entire 9.5 gb. I did 5 partition. 2 x 350mb and 2 x 3.9gb and 1 x 1700gb. DH0: through DH4:

Problem is when booting only first and second partition show on the workbench. Now if I go to shell and do a CD DH2: then the third partition pops up. Same goes for fourth etc. Once I reboot they are gone again.
What I did is added each of those partitions name to the Path in the startup-sequence and now they do show up.

Is this ok? Is there a problem that they do not mount automatically at boot?
Will I have data corruption or this is normal. Why are they not showing up normally?
Thanks for any help!!

[thomas]

That's normal behaviour. Partitions outside the first 4GB of the drive cannot be mounted without IDEfix and IDEfix cannot patch scsi.device on the fly.

Edit s:startup-sequence and replace the line reading c:idefix by c:loadide reset.

This will add an automatic reboot after power-on, just like OS 3.5 or 3.9 would do it. IDEfix will stay resident in memory so that it is active early enough and the partitions can be mounted correctly.

[essence25]

Thanks for the quick reply,

After replacing c:IdeFiX with the command & parameter you described above, I get a dos screen nag "Idefix: object already exists" at every boot and it goes into low res ugly workbench, plus message "Intuition is attempting to reset the workbench screen". If I add the "quiet" parameter then it boots fine. eg: LoadIDE reset quiet.
"LoadIDE start quiet" works fine also and all partitions show up in both cases. So do I keep the "reset quiet" parameter or use "start quiet"? either seem to fix my problem.
Do I need to install any other patches if I have IDEfix?

Also, what is the best setting for max transfersize and buffers for a drive like mine. Seagate ST310014ACE(from xbox) on A4000D internal IDE controller.

Using SFS I have it set:
Workbench partition to 0x1fe00 and the rest to 0xffffff max transfer setting.
Blocksize to 512 and buffers at 100 for all.

Is there a nice GUI based HD benchmark proggy that would show the differences in
performace as a result of playing with those settings?

Now its time to fill up that drive, we'll see if I get any problems. Especially with those two 3.9gb partitions I made. ;-)

[thomas]

"LoadIDE start quiet" works fine also and all partitions show up in both cases.

Are you sure ? Did you switch off the computer to test ?

IDEfix loads IDEfix into memory (for the current session only).
LoadIDE START loads IDEfix into memory (for this session) and makes it resident (for the next session)
LoadIDE RESET loads IDEfix into memory, makes it resident and causes a reset.

So for the first session after power-on there shouldn't be a difference between IDEfix and LoadIDE START. But after a reset, IDEfix has to be run again while LoadIDE remains active.

To test LoadIDE, you always have to switch off the computer. Because if you can LoadIDE once and only do resets after that, the resident module is used and changing LoadIDE's parameters does not change anything.

Do I need to install any other patches if I have IDEfix?

No, you don't. IDEfix + SFS is a perfect combination.

Workbench partition to 0x1fe00 and the rest to 0xffffff max transfer setting.

The MaxTransfer value applies to the entire HDD. So you should use the same value for all partitions on that HDD. Anything else does not make sense.

[Vicky]

Thanks so much for this post. I was having the same problem and this fixed it. Yes, Thomas, I am sure. I have done it now with 3 SD cards and checked by doing several cold boots per card with no issues or error messages of any kind.