Power Computing fastATA questions.

[Charlie]

I'm v. pleased to report I'm the proud owner of a new & rather well-specced A1200.
( This Amiga buying gets a little out of hand once you start )

It's got the above controller - Good.
3.9 Installed via WinUAE - Thanks Toni.
Working fine in 'real' A1200 - Good.
( PFS-040 rather than FFS )

Final partition not recognised in the 'real' miggy - Odd.
( It straddles the 4gig + mark, but then this is 3.9 )

Install the proper fastATA drivers, HDD no-longer recognised - Bum!
Comment out the relevant line in startup-sequence, as before - Hmmm.

Is this to do with this controller auto-partitioning drives bigger than 4gig?
Should I have set the HDD up via the fastATA controller rather than WinUAE?

Is PFS the problem?
Should I have used PFS-040ds?

Using the latest drivers so am I correct in thinking I don't need to alter setpatch etc to disable scsi.device updates?

Thanks.

[Calgor]

If you do not install the FastATA drivers, then it will operate like a normal A1200 IDE port (which OS3.9 should be able to handle up to 128GB, as long as you installed the drive properly and have the right filesystems).

Getting the FastATA drivers to work properly above 4GB I myself have a problem. It is important whether the FastATA drivers are before or after SetPatch. According to Elbox, they should be before SetPatch for OS3.9.

If the drive was previously used with FastATA drivers, then AFAIK you need to keep on using it with FastATA or reformat the whole drive (above 4GB, possibly b4). This part is not clear to me nor in the documentation.

[Charlie]

Thanks Calgor
Looks like the thing to do is keep fiddling 'til it works...

[Calgor]

If the data is important, first copy off stuff onto a cf card in the pcmcia slot using a pcmcia-cf adapter

Trust me, since the fastata is a special driver (with some bugs in older versions if you have large partitions in detecting SPLIT/NOSPLIT mode), it can stuff things up if not installed correctly.