HDD problems

[Buleste]

That shows that IDEFix is working. Because the standard 3.1 ROMS has no ability to detect HDD over 4GB it will only detect the first 4gb of your HDD. If your first partition is 2GB and the second is > than 2GB it will not detect your second partition and all subsequent partitions. However when you do a soft reboot IDEFix has already patched your system to accept >4GB HDD which is why it is recognising the other partitions. Try getting ffstd64.lha Even though you don't use FFS it might help but i doubt it. 3.1 just wasn't built for large HDD's.

I would now like to hand you over to our friend Bloodwych in a thread on EAB. Here.

[Harrison]

But I thought that IDEFix patches scsi.device during startup via the startup sequence?

I know it remains resident in memory on reboot (because I edited the startup-sequence to make it do this) and this is what I'm guessing is the reason why the extra partitions appear, but I thought as it was patching it to start immediately that it would see them on first boot?

[Buleste]

You'd have to double check with the IDEFix documentation on that one but giving that you aren't having any joy i'd say either you've not quite got IDEFix set up to do this or it doesn't. TBH I've only ever used HDD >4GB with either 3.5 or 3.9 and even then it's not always easy.

What entry do you have in startup-sequence?

[Harrison]

I think if anything, it might be something in the startup-sequence that needs to be altered.

At the moment I've got:

;BEGIN IDEFIX
If Exists C:IDEfix
; C:IDEfix
LoadIDE START Quiet
EndIf
;End IDEfix

[Buleste]

First off is the semi colon before c:IDEfix on line 3 that means you're not actually starting idefix at the moment. Try that and see if that works.

[Harrison]

According to the text comment above that line it tells me to replace C:IDEfix with LoadIDEfix Quiet. That is the reason I commented out the C:IDEfix line. I've also tried it with and without it commented and it seems to make no different.

[Buleste]

The if statement is there to see if idefix exists then if it does it then goes C:idefix etc. but if it doesn't exist then it skips the lines until endif. you need to remove the semi colon. The loadide is a different command.

Try putting a semi colon before the LoadIDE command and see if that works (i dont appear to use tha command at all in any of my startup).

I've just been looking at the installation file and for IDEFix to work you must add "C:IDEFix" or "LoadIDE reset" to your startup-sequence. It appears that if you use LoadIDE it has to do a soft reboot before it works so in theory if you just use C:IDEFix it should work. If not just add reset to the LoadIDE command.

[Harrison]

Great, cheers for that info. I've tried just C:IDEfix on its own and that didn't work until I did a soft reset, and LoadIDE START Quiet was the same, but I've not tried LoadIDE reset. I will give that last one a try and see what happens.

[Buleste]

LoadIDE reset will work fine as it's just doing a soft reset early in the startup. Hopefully it shouldn't put it into a loop of start/reset etc.

[Harrison]

OK, here are my findings trying out each of the different commands, trying each in the startup-sequence to see what they would do. And with each I did a cold boot, followed by a reset/warm reboot.

"C:IDEfix"
Cold boot: only first partition appears + CD drive works.
Soft reboot: still only first partition appears + CD drive works.

"LoadIDE START Quiet"
Cold Boot: only first partition appears + CD drive works.
Soft reboot: All partitions now appear + CD drive works.

"LoadIDE reset"
Cold Boot: The Amiga starts to boot for about a second, then the screen flashes and does a reset (presumably it has loaded IDEFix and then resets), however it then shows a message saying IDEFix is already loaded and then an error screen saying intuition is trying to reset the screenmode. However all of the HD partitions are present and the CD drive works.
Soft reboot: Everything loads as it should. All partitions are present and CD works.

"LoadIDE reset Quiet"
Initial attempt: Amiga did quick load and reset to make IDEfix resident. But then the system halted on a black screen. A soft reset then loaded everything properly.
A second attempt did the following:
Cold Boot: Seems to work! All partitions and CD Drive work.
Soft Reboot: Everything loads as it should. All partitions and CD work.

So it looks like "LoadIDE reset Quiet" is the one to use. However it seemed to not work the first time I tried, but has since. Time will tell if it continues to work or not. Fingers crossed it does.

Now everything is working I can get on with customising the case to fit everything inside (at the moment the CD drive is sitting to the left of the A1200 with the ribbon cable going into the side of the case).