Cannot see ANY HD's with HDtoolbox...

OK, I have the other thread regarding the Syquest drive, but now I am not certain it is specifically a Syquest issue...

I bought a GVP 68030 combo SCSI card with 16 MB.. No disks / software
I also bought a ROM switcher with 1.3 and 3.1 ROMS as well as Worbench 3.1.

So I replaced the 2.0 ROM with the switcher and it works great... I removed the Amiga SCSI hardcard that was installed... I then installed the GVP card and it is faaast. Had zero issues with the card and sysinfo shows it as very fast and the 16Mb of memory shows as it should.

I then re-installed Workbench with the 3.1 disks and it offered to upgrade my existing install and replace any files necessary. No issues with the upgrade and restarted and it boots from my HD fine. I can also get it to boot from my 2 MEG CF card as well.

The problem is that I can't get HDToolbox to see ANY drives when I run it now. Since this is my only Amiga, I need to be able to see the SCSI drives so I can format other CF cards, SCSI drives and hopefully Syquest drives.

Any ideas on why I can't see SCSI drives in HDToolbox? (Even though I can boot from SCSI?)

I could be wrong here, but you could have to tell HDToolBox to use scsi.device or some other .device file by clicking on the HDToolBox icon, and doing Icon Menu -> Information.

I think I had to do something like that with my A500+ to get HDToolBox to notice a hard drive. It was a few years ago now though and I can't remember exactly what I did.

I think Steve is correct. It is probably related to the scsi.device driver being used by HDToolKit not matching the device driver controlling the GVP SCSI card.

If the drives are connected to a GVP SCSI card then GVP use their own SCSI device that isn't the same as the standard Workbench device. I think it is called gvpscsi.device

Just edit the icon information for HDToolBox and change the device entry to match the device driver for your SCSI card. It should then work.

Also make sure you have the most up to date GVP SCSI device driver to make sure it includes support for the drives you have connected. The last release was 4.15 and can be downloaded from here.

I am kind of at an impasse here. You guys are giving great information and I have recommendations for several downloads... Problem is that my Amiga is not online and since my PC's cannot even SEE an Amiga formatted drive / CF card I have no way of downloading a driver / file and transferring it to the Amiga. (And no Catweasel)

The GVP 68030 card is working, but came with no documentation or driver disks and I believe I need to load drivers for it to work properly... I attempted to change HDToolbox to use gvpscsi.device but it did not work. (Probably because this device requires a driver disk to load it) I was able to get it to recognize omniscsi.device, but then it listed something like 30+ devices all listed as "unknown" It DID properly recognize my HD but not my CF card...

Whew. Confusing stuff, but I think my fix is to find a copy of the latest GVP SCSI drivers and somehow get them to my Amiga. Then change the HDToolbox to point to gvpscsi.device and I SHOULD be good to go. (Then I will go back to trying to tackle the Syquest question..)

Any suggestions on how to get the drivers to my Amiga with no network connection on the Amiga and no Catweasel? :owned:

You are using Workbench 3.1, so have native support for reading and writing to PC formatted floppy disks. Normal Amiga drives can only read double density 720K formatted PC disks though, and not 1.4MB HD disks. So you will need to use Amiga DD floppy disks formatted to 720KB PC disks for the transfer.

If you are using Windows XP or newer then you cannot format a DD 720KB disk from Windows. So try doing it in Workbench instead.

If you haven't done so yet to activate CrossDOS in Workbench you need to copy the PC0: disk device driver into your Workbench installation from your Workbench disks. Reboot, and then when you insert a blank disk you should get 2 icons. One an Amiga icon for floppy disks and another for PC floppy disks. Select the PC one and format the disk as a PC disk.

Now stick the disk in the PC and copy the Amiga files onto it to transfer them over.

If you can't format the disc as PC on the Amiga, I have posted elsewhere on the forum how you can still format 720KB floppy disks on newer versions of Windows.

Hope that helps.

Failing that, you mentioned you have used a CF card to boot the Amiga? If so you can put the CF card into a card reader on the PC, then using the emulator WinUAE you can mount the Amiga formatted CF card as a harddrive and access it in the emulator just as you would on the real Amiga.

Then to copy files to the CF card in WinUAE, create a directory/folder somewhere on your PC and also mount that as another HDD in WinUAE. You can then put any files into this directory on the PC, and they will be seen and accessible in WinUAE. Allowing you to copy them to the CF card.

Holy Crap Batman... That's a lot of info to digest!
Thank you! I am going to try ALL of it this weekend and see what works for me..

Just for the record I tried to use Amikit setup with OS3.5 to read my CF card but I couldn't get it to see the darn thing. Not sure what I need to do to get it to mount the CF card...

(I feel kinda bad as all I have done is ask questions since I joined... I am usually the answer guy when it comes to PC stuff, but starting from scratch again with the Amiga and I have little to offer as of yet...)

Hopefully, I will be able to give back eventually..
Thanks again.. :whistle:

Don't worry mate. We are here to help.

Just try adding the CF card in the WinUAE properties/harddrives section as an additional HDD. It should then appear in Workbench as an extra HDD.

Alrighty then... I was able to get the CF card recognized in WINUAE and will work with that some more soon. (Thanks Harrison)

I have made some significant progress... Discovered that my GVP 030 has an after market guru rom V6.10 installed. (That is why gvpscsi.device doesn't work, the Guru uses omniscsi.device.) So now I threw in an olds scsi drive and was able to get it formatted and re-installed Amiga OS... Fully intended to load OS 3.5 from CD, threw the CD in and .... NOTHING

So I copied my ide-fix97 from my cf card to the new hd and it won't let me install it. Keeps erroring out saying it can't find the installer tool. WTF? :huh2:

(I read somewhere something about having to copy this to the path, but I don't know what this means? I have copied it and moved it all over the drive and nothing seems to work.. (And I KNOW the program worked as it works on my CF card when I boot there.)

Once again looking to the Classic Amiga Gurus for any ideas..
Thx