A3000: WB 1.3 booting problems
 

I am working on an early A3000 with the superkickstart setup. The problem is that the original hard drive was dead and unrecoverable. I replaced it with a SCSI2SD 5.2 setup. I've got this partitioning arrangement:
- WB_1.3 - FFS, no international
- WB_2.x - FFS, no international
- AMAX partition - whatever AMAX is, shows up as NDOS
- Work partition - FFS, no international

Eventually I want to get 3.2 ("2 weeks") or 3.1.4 on the WB_2.x partition, but for now, I'm just trying to get it all up and running.

If I start from floppy, both 1.3 and 2.1 show up fine (both starting from 1.3 and 2.1 kick). The 1.3 WB install SEEMS fine (but it's not loading from that, it loaded from the floppy).

If I start from HD:
- WB_1.3: kickstart boots, but get "not a DOS disk in unit 0" on WB load.
- WB_2.1: boots ok

I've tried using advanced boot menu to disable the other 3 partitions, but get same result, so I think "unit 0" does refer to the WB_1.3 partition. Which is weird, to me, because it works well enough for it to find the superkickstart in devs/kickstart and boot from that.

aah... just tried again and noticed a window that popped up behind the WB window. "Error validating disk "Work" key 425953 checksum error". I think that might be a red herring, because if I disable Work partition, I still get the Not a DOS disk error.

Any ideas?

Did you add FFS V36 to the RDB?

I believe I setup the SD card initially with rdbtool with v40 ("$VER: fs 40.1 (15.2.93)"). But I used HDSetup on the WB2.1 disk to change the FFS for each partition to the FFS that WB2.1 knew about. It shows as 0x444f5301 (after I did that, it ended in 5303 before).

Looking just now though, maybe I don't understand. If I click "Change file system for partition", I get the new 0x444f5301 showing as the FFS for each partition. Which is what I expect, as I changed each of them using that button. But from that same panel, if I select "Add/update file systems", I get 0x444f5303, version 2621441... 24588 size... custom file system.

Can there be separate file system for the device as whole, compared to each partition?

The identifier (like 0x444f5301) assigns a file system to a partition.

But the code to read the file system needs to be loaded from somewhere, too. Kick 3.1.4 has FFS in ROM, but 1.3 doesn't. Therefore it has to be added to the partition table (a.k.a. RDB) using the Add/Update menu.

The file system in the Add/Update menu has to have the same identifier as the partition, otherwise it won't find a match.

The old partitioning tool does not seperate version and revision. This high number is version * 65536 + revision. So 2621441 actually means 40.1.

You can use FFS V40 if you change its identifier to 0x444f5301. V36 is the one which comes with 1.3.

THANK YOU!

I don't know if there was an easier way to solve it, but this is what I did:
- booted from 2.1, did more l/fastfilesystem. first screen revealed it as 36.104
- open HDToolBox
- Click partition drive
- select the WB 1.3 partition
- select Advanced Options
- click Add/update file systems
- click Delete file system
- click Add new file system. it pre-fills with l:fastfilesystem, but leaves 0 as version
- math: 65536*36+104 = 2359400. put that into version field.
- ok -> ok -> save change to drive -> exit
- reboot

Beautiful blue 1.3 screen comes right up!