How to get Mount gracefully fail

[iZero]

Background:

My previous A1200 IDE setup was EIDE’99 with following drives:
-primary
+-master CF card for the system
+-slave DVD-drive

-secondary
+-master CF card for transferring files
+-slave none

I upgraded my machine to have TF1260 and made custom kickstart having ehide.device which I used for booting the system. Now the setup is:

TF1260’s IDE: CF card for system

A1200 IDE with EIDE’99:
-primary
+-master CF card for transferring files (or maybe booting for special cases)
+-slave DVD-drive

-secondary
+-master none
+-slave none

So, in old setup, I could insert another CF card to the secondary reader and then run Mount CF_Auto: in S:User-startup would mount the card if it was present. With the new setup the Mount command will freeze the system when it runs if there's no card present.

I have fat95 in L and following CF_Auto file in SYS:Storage/DOSDrivers

FileSystem = L:fat95
Device = scsi.device
Unit = 0
BlockSize = 512
Surfaces = 1
SectorsPerBlock = 1
BlocksPerTrack = 1
Reserved = 0
PreAlloc = 0
Interleave = 0
MaxTransfer = 0x00FFFE00
Mask = 0x7FFFFFFE
LowCyl = 0
HighCyl = 252928
Buffers = 50
BufMemType = 1
StackSize = 16384
Priority = 10
GlobVec = -1
DosType = 0x46415401
Activate = 1
Mount = 1
/* Bootable = FALSE */
#

Unit number was in previous setup 2

Question: is there a way to get this working in some way?
I can of course run the Mount command manually when there’s a card present, but it was so nice when it automatically mounted at the startup.

Can I somehow probe if there’s the unit 0 present before issuing the Mount command? Or get the Mount fail so that I could continue the user-startup with FailAt

I could of course put the secondary CF-reader back to secondary ide channel, but is there a way to get it work like this (I've had some hickups with EIDE'99 driver and/or idefix 97)

[paul1981]

Hmm... I should learn to read properly! Last post edited out!

Try changing Mount=1 to 0
Try changing Activate=1 to 0 if above doesn't work

Can't remember exactly what does what but it might help.

[thomas]

Originally Posted by iZero

Can I somehow probe if there’s the unit 0 present before issuing the Mount command?

It's surely possible to write a program which allows you to do this.

Or get the Mount fail so that I could continue the user-startup with FailAt

No. I doubt it's the command which freezes the system. The Mount command cannot judge whether the mount was successful or not. It just starts the FAT95 process and quits. FAT95 tries to open scsi.device unit 0. And then either scsi.device or FAT95 causes the system to freeze.

You could try to swap master/slave on the CF reader and DVD drive.

Or put each device on its own channel, both as master.

[iZero]

Thanks for the answers, so it's time to finally learn some Amiga programming, and before that, I think that I will add menuitem to mount the card when needed.

Testing those mountfile settings resulted so that changing the Mount=1 to Mount=0 works kind of, it doesn't freeze anymore, but it doesn't do the mount either. Activate doesn't matter if the mount is 0.

[thomas]

Activate and Mount are synonyms. You should specify only one of them. If you add both with different values, results are undefined.

If the value is 0, the command will add the drive to the DOS list but it is activated only on the first access.

[thomas]

Here is a program which can check if a device is present at a given device/unit position.

It can even check the type of device, so you can check if there is a CD/DVD drive or a HDD/CF.

[rare_j]

Very nice and useful, thank you!

[iZero]

Thank you thomas, I will test it tomorrow, looks very good!

[iZero]

It seems that my setup causes problems also to that checkdev program. If CF card is not present the program will freeze. Works fine when card is in place.

I need to check if my slim dvd will work as a master and if that would solve the case.

[paul1981]

PCMCIA freezes can occur in KS3.1 where they did not prior in KS3.0. Did you change your Kickstart or OS from when it worked to not worked? I see you mention custom KS, so perhaps yes... and perhaps this is causing some issue here.

[iZero]

Well I did make a custom version of 3.2.1 roms as I needed the ehide.device for booting from the TF1260's IDE, but no other changes than including it. And if it matters my PCMCIA network card has been working before and after that fine. I believe that the problem is that the IDE channel doesn't basically have master present when there's no CF card inserted. I cannot change the slim dvd's master/slave status as there's no option for that so I just need to live with that.

Anyway my use case is such that I don't need to mount the secondary CF card too often, I just added a menu item for the mounting so that can be done quickly when needed.

But with the program that thomas provided I can tweak the startup-sequence a bit as I can check if the dvd has disc inserted and only then run the cd32 emulation startup-sequence so it is very useful program.

[Thomas Richter]

Originally Posted by paul1981

PCMCIA freezes can occur in KS3.1 where they did not prior in KS3.0. Did you change your Kickstart or OS from when it worked to not worked? I see you mention custom KS, so perhaps yes... and perhaps this is causing some issue here.

Huh? Actually, this should be vice versa, namely potential freezes in 3.0 and (unfortunately) 3.1.4. The issue is that if you have fast mem in the upper 4MB of the Zorro-II area, this are will be required, even if only temporarily, by an inserted PCMCIA card. Thus, if there is any program code currently running there, the system will crash. The solution, as sad as it sounds, is to disable the PCMCIA port completely if there is conflicting RAM in the system. That unfortunately even goes for pure I/O PCMCIA cards as PCMCIA is, upon insertion, always in the "memory mode" and software needs to perform a "hand over" to the IO mode. However, at the time a PCMCIA card is inserted, it may already be too late as the memory is already gone (and by that, the system...).