Harddrive trouble

[robotriot]

So I was refurbishing my A1200 over last few days and got everything running today, except for Warp3D, but I don't really need it anyway. So I switched the Amiga on about two hours ago, and it didn't boot anymore. The harddisk LED was blinking a little, then all disk activity stopped at a black screen. I rebooted without startup-sequence, this worked so far. At first I thought something in the startup-sequence was causing the problems, but when I edited it a little to try to find out where the problem was, I was unable to save the file ... ed didn't quit and the HD LED was constantly lit. I reset the machine again in "safe mode". I tried DIR on several directories, which worked fine. But trying to run anything but setpatch or ed didn't seem to work - I got a "Volume Workbench is not validated" at one time.

Ok, so I thought I could finally use that 3.5" 20GB harddisk that I still had lying around. I disconnected the old (2.5" 3GB) harddisk and booted Workbench 3.0 from floppy in DF1: (DF0: doesn't work anymore either, no idea where the problem lies here :/). Of course, the hdtoolbox doesn't know what to do with such a large harddisk, but it was able to partition it with 163MB. The next step I did after copying WB files to the HD was to get the CD-ROM driver working to install OS3.9. My plan was to run the 3.9 hdtoolbox to try and reformat the harddisk to able to use all of the 20GB. After a successfull installation, I got this problem though: after booting, I get the message "Amidock Program failed (Error #8000003D)". Same thing with the HDtoolbox itself, it gives me the very same error message. At first I thought it might be the missing 060 libs, but after copying them over, I still get the same problem. Booting with no s-s doesn't help either, because then hdtoolbox complains about a missing resource.library. I'm getting really annoyed by this, it took me several hours to set up the non-working A1200 at first, and now this >( I hope anyone here can help me with this ... here are the full specs just in case:

A1200
Blizzard 1260/50Mhz/64MB RAM
Kick 3.1/OS3.9
4-way IDE adapter w/ TEAC CD writer
Mediator PCI w/ Voodoo3 & 100MBit Ethernet

[thomas]

Blizzard 1260

You have to install the 680x0 libs before you try to run OS3.9. It's a wonder that it passed SetPatch at all.

Of course, the hdtoolbox doesn't know what to do with such a large harddisk

That's not true. You can partition the entire disk with HDToolbox 3.0. Only the calculated amounts are displayed wrongly. If you enter the correct geometry and only use the low and high cylinder values for partitions, there is no problem to create partitions above the 4GB limit.

However, you must not access (format etc.) any partition which is fully or partially above the 4GB border of the drive.

[robotriot]

Originally Posted by thomas

You have to install the 680x0 libs before you try to run OS3.9. It's a wonder that it passed SetPatch at all.

Ok, so I formatted the 163MB again and installed WB3.0, copied the 060 libs over, created a new OS3.9 emergeny boot disk and booted from that one. When I try running Hdtoolbox on that disk I'm still getting the error message above, so the 060 libs were not the cause of the problem it seems ...

That's not true. You can partition the entire disk with HDToolbox 3.0. Only the calculated amounts are displayed wrongly. If you enter the correct geometry and only use the low and high cylinder values for partitions, there is no problem to create partitions above the 4GB limit.

However, you must not access (format etc.) any partition which is fully or partially above the 4GB border of the drive.

Ok, but how do I enter the values? On the 20GB HD it says 16383 total cylinders, but when I try entering that in hdtoolbox it doesn't accept the value ...

[thomas]

Originally Posted by robotriot

Ok, so I formatted the 163MB again and installed WB3.0, copied the 060 libs over, created a new OS3.9 emergeny boot disk and booted from that one. When I try running Hdtoolbox on that disk I'm still getting the error message above, so the 060 libs were not the cause of the problem it seems ...

Strange. I never had any problems with the emergency disk or AmiDock.

On the 20GB HD it says 16383 total cylinders,

That's not the real value. 16383 is the maximum old BIOSes can accept. But it limits the drive to 8GB. For 20GB you should have something around 38752 cylinders.

If you don't find the real number of cylinders, get the total number of blocks and calculate the cylinders:

heads * sectors * cylinders = total number of blocks

but when I try entering that in hdtoolbox it doesn't accept the value ...

What does it do ? You have to press enter after updating an input field.

[robotriot]

Originally Posted by thomas

That's not the real value. 16383 is the maximum old BIOSes can accept. But it limits the drive to 8GB. For 20GB you should have something around 38752 cylinders.

If you don't find the real number of cylinders, get the total number of blocks and calculate the cylinders:

heads * sectors * cylinders = total number of blocks

This is all the information I have on the drive:

Model Cylinders Heads Sectors Capacity (*) Sectors (**) Capacity (**)
MPF3204AT 16,383 16 63 8.45 GB 40,031,712 20.4 GB
How do I get the required information out of that? I'm not really into hardware ^^

What does it do ? You have to press enter after updating an input field.

Yea, I pressed enter, but the screen flashes in dark grey, and the value is reset to what it was before ... (using hdtoolbox from a 3.1 install disk)

[thomas]

This is the total number of blocks: 40,031,712
This means your values are 16 heads, 63 sectors and 39,714 cylinders. The 3.9 version of HDToolbox would use 8 heads, 252 sectors and 19,857 cylinders. Perhaps you cannot use more than 32k cylinders, so try these values. The capacity of the drive is 20,496,236,544 bytes which equals 19.09 GB.

Alternatively you can also use HDInstTool: http://www.aminet.net/search.php?query=hdinsttool

[Severin]

This probably won't help you much but one way to track down startup-sequence problems is to boot with no startup then enter the following two commands:

set echo on
execute s:startup-sequence

Now you will see every program that's started printed in your shell window so it's easy to find where the problem is.