Hard Drive problems

I've been trying for a few days now to set up a real hard drive in winUAE with the intention of fitting it to an A1200 when it's all set up but winUAE seems to be having problems with Amiga drives.

The drive in question has been used in a windows laptop before so I have to start up with the -disableharddrivesafetycheck option which allows WinUAE to see the drive, I can get as far as creating partitions and installing SFS on the drive without issue. (following the guide within the FAQ here) However after the enforced reboot before formatting the partitions, WinUAE crashes on startup.

Further investigation has led me to the point that if winUAE believes the drive is a suitable amiga drive (ie it can be added to a configuration without using "-disableharddrivesafetycheck") then WinUAE will crash on startup.

Anyone got any ideas on what is causing this behaviour?

[Toni Wilen]

Crash means what? Emulation crashes? Emulator crashes?
Does it work if you use single FFS partition?
Which SFS version?
Lines in winuaelog.txt before crash?

Sorry, couldn't give much more info earlier as I was at work and not able to get to my amiga stuff.

When it crashes I get en error "Crash detected minidump saved as [filepath]" then a standard XP "Do you want to send an error report" dialog.

It doesn't seem particularly dependent on what filesystem or combination of partitions i'm using. In fact if I abort the process before I've even set up partitions and then try to start WinUAE with the hard drive mounted I still get the same problem.

Various errorlogs attached

[Toni Wilen]

BlockSize: 512, Surfaces: 1, SectorsPerBlock 1
SectorsPerTrack: 272, Reserved: 2, LowCyl 2, HighCyl 3902
Buffers: 30, BufMemType: 00000000, MaxTransfer: 00ffffff, BootPri: 0
RDB: RDB filesystem 444F5303 version 40.1
RDB: 444F5303 in FileSystem.resouce version 39.17
RDB: Filesystem loaded, 24600 bytes
Mounting uaehf.device 1 (0) (size=0):
failed, blocksize == 0
Mounting uaehf.device 2 (0) (size=0):
failed, blocksize == 0

This is wrong but it shouldn't never happen..

Blocksize is zero when automounting partitions but it is correct (512) before automount process starts. Did you use HDToolBox? Which version? Can you try other tool? (maybe partition data stored in RDB is not 100% correct or incorrectly handled)

I'll do more debugging later..

I've made some progress. Up until now I've been using a kickstart 3.0 ROM. I've tried it with a 3.1 ROM and it seems to be behaving itself (partition is formatting as I type this).

I did use HDToolbox (can't find a version # anywhere but it's part of a Workbench 3.1 diskset)