A1060 Sidecar won't boot from MakeAB PCHD file

[Zweistein]

Hi,
after fixing my various connection and startup woes with the A1000 and A1060, I'm struck with one final (hopefully!) issue that I hope maybe someone can help me confirm:


I am running the A1000 with KS/WB 1.3 and matching Janus software (PCInstall 1.3 which has install routines for all of Sidecar, A2088 and A2286). Everything has been loaded onto a CF card that the A1000 boots from. So far, so good.


Since the file card installed in the A1060 has failed, I have removed that and want to use a PC hard disk file on the Amiga side instead - something I recall as having done for a long time when working with an A2000 back in the day (1989 to be exact)


MakeAB ran flawlessly, and a autoboot control file named "ABoot.CTRL" has been created in SYS:PC/System/ - however when starting up the Sidecar, it reports "Could not open AutoBoot control file SYS:PC/System/ABoot.CTRL." - the file is clearly there, the sequence of "BindDrivers" and then "PCDisk" in the startup-sequence is correct (otherwise it wouldn't even attempt to read that file, I assume) - booting off of a floppy and running fdisk gives "no fixed disks found" overlayed over another instance of the error message above.


Is there something peculiar about the sidecar that prevents it from using an Amiga autoboot file? (Obviously, back in the day having an internal HDD in the A1000 was not exactly common, so the feature may have been intended and tested only on the A2000) Has anyone ever managed to get this to work?


And yes - I've tried all possible permutations of formatting the ABoot.CTRL file (quotes/no quotes/line break after file name/no line break...) - it seems to fail _reading_ (finding?) the file to begin with.


Options would be somebody confirming it _has_ worked for her/him in the past, suggesting some kind of SW/HW issue in my setup, or somebody confirming that it was never meant to work or successfully tried in this setup, meaning I shouldn't waste any more time trying.


Thanks,
Jerry

[leof]

This might be your problem:
6. If you plan to use this partition with any of the various Bridgeboards,
you will need to edit the ABOOT.CTRL file which is usually in the PC/SYSTEM
drawer. Put in this file the name of your PC partition (i.e IBMC:, IBMD:
etc.) Be sure you have the ":", but do not put a carraige return (newline)
at the end. Thus, you should have one line only in the file.
From this website.

Edit: I now saw you already tried all variants. No luck then.