Why is the 1200's internal IDE so Flakey?

[XDelusion]

So I bought a 1200 off a guy about a month ago. When I first plugged it in, it fired right up, booted off the internal hard drive and all was well!!!

After tinkering with it a bit I decided that the 200Mb Internal Hard Drive just would not do. I then put in a CF2IDE adapter with a 4Gb card, but it would not see it. I tried a different CF card, still no go.
Used a different adapter with 4Gb card. No go.

Different adapter with 8Gb card. Detected!!!!

I formatted this puppy and was ready to go, only having to softboot at boot time once in a blue moon to keep it from trying to boot from floppy instead.

Since then I ordered a 20Gb 2.5" Hard Drive. I could not get it to detect for nothing, but I expected as much considering that the Amiga has a it's size limitations.

I then formatted it in OS 3.9 under WinUAE detecting it as a UAE scsi device, then installed WorkBench 3.1 on it as well as PFS for all but the boot patition.

I put it back on my 1200 and it booted!!! But only after a few million attempts.

(I've noticed that when you boot and hold down both mouse buttons to choose your boot options that the Hard Drive does not always show as an option, so it's like the Amiga does not always acknowledge the hard drive at all!!!)

Anyhow, I booted off the drive and all was well except that my 8Gb partition was not being recognized as a readable partition.
I went into Hard Drive Tools, and was about to fix the drive partition, but I noticed that it only recognized the drive as being 8Gb total, not just the partition.

I figured that this had to do with WB3.1's size limitation, but was confused...

ain't that supposed to be capped off at 4Gb?

Anyhow, what I had to do what create a 3.9 boot disc that looked on my CF card fro OS3.9 rather than the Cd-Rom since I have no CD-ROM installed on this computer.

Booting off the Disc and getting the Amiga to detect both the CF Card in the PCMCIA slot as well as the Hard Drive at the same time was a major pain in the ass, but once I finally got it to do so, I re-formatted and partitioned the drive, once again using PFS on all partitions except for the boot partition.

Having installed OS 3.9 this time everything seemed fine, till I installed Boing Bag 2 (after Boing Bag 1 of course) which now causes my system to give me an error screen with either the red or yellow text at boot time.

I then decided once again that I had no use fro 3.9, especially if an official update was going to screw up my system.

I went back to my 8Gb CF using the CF2IDE adapter. I installed PFS to all but the boot partition and went back to 3.1.

Now my Amiga has to be rebooted a million times just to detect the card. Sometimes I sit there and reset my Amiga for like an hour before it detects.

I tried the 200Mb HD that came with the system, but now it even has issues detecting. Same goes for my 20Gb Hard Drive which is now problematic as well.

BTW I also cut the Pin 1 wire which I've been told helps the Amiga detect the Hard Drive in time, or allows the Hard Drive extra time to spin up or something.


Annoying...

Maybe the 1200's were really built as cheaply as some people say.


P.S. I presume that you can't boot off one of these either?

http://amigakit.leamancomputing.com/...oducts_id=1052

[Loedown]

It sounds like you have an intermittant fault of some kind more than anything else.

[fgh]

This is not representative of the a1200 IDE, sounds like a problem with your a1200 hardware to me.
I don't know what could cause such behaviour though..

Could faulty capacitors lead to something like this?
The CIA chips also fail sometimes, but I don't think they have anything to do with the IDE..

Some notes for your troubleshooting

• The various size limitations will not prevent hdtoolbox from detecting a device, only accessing the full size
• Spinup time should anyway not be a factor with CF cards
• Only devices partitioned with an amiga RDB will show up in early boot menu
• First partition may also be PFS, file system is stored on the drive
• Yes, the Elbox Fast ATA is bootable.

I'd post a wanted ad on amibay.com for another a1200 motherboard before spending all that on a fast ATA.

[XDelusion]

Sighhh...

yes my A600 and PAL 1200 do not act flaky like this...

[XDelusion]

Hmm, I installed PFS to all my patitions in (WinUAE), put it back on my 1200, and now it boots every time!

Though...

It boots in 4 seconds flat, but the first time I opened my System partition, it drew all the icons instantly, but 1. That one took about 2 seconds then finally appeared. I then clicked on it "PREFS" and all those Icons opened but one, and during the few seconds it took to draw that last Icon, I could not do anything in that directory.

After that it was fine. Also after I rebooted this still happened, but did not take nearly as long to draw that last icon. Not a HUGE problem because it is still faster in the long run, and again it is at least working, but...

Will try my 20Gb 2.5" IDE Drive next.

[XDelusion]

Originally Posted by fgh

Some notes for your troubleshooting

• The various size limitations will not prevent hdtoolbox from detecting a device, only accessing the full size
• Spinup time should anyway not be a factor with CF cards
• Only devices partitioned with an amiga RDB will show up in early boot menu
• First partition may also be PFS, file system is stored on the drive
• Yes, the Elbox Fast ATA is bootable.

Very good to know!! Thankx!