Vanishing hard drives

**Amiga_Always** · 12th November 2011, 14:31

Here's a puzzler for you!

I recently revived my old a1200 and powered it up to find the hard drive made some very odd noises and refused to boot. I changed the drive for a cf adapter I had with 4gb card, booted from floppy, partitioned the drive fine, rebooted and no partitions came up to format. Tried this 3 times, then tried a real hard drive, same thing. I've changed the cable and power supply in desparation with no joy.

Any ideas anyone?

**Phantom** · 12th November 2011, 14:38

Ensure that your hard drive is being recognised by the A1200 at the Early Startup-Mouse (by holding both mouse buttons at startup). Also what program do you use? I suppose the original HDToolBox what came with Workbench? Does this recognises your hard drive?

**Amiga_Always** · 12th November 2011, 14:59

No sign of it in Early Startup, yet HD Toolbox sees it no problem. I have set up tons of drives in the past so I'm pretty sure it's not me. Are thrre any other partitioning tools you recommend?

**Phantom** · 12th November 2011, 15:03

Try HDInstTools from Aminet. Easy to acquire. I never had problems with HDToolBox, as it's my prefered method instead of HDInstTools (while it seems and feels better allowing big partitions, actually it's not as it seems), but try with that if you have success.

**Amiga_Always** · 12th November 2011, 22:36

Solved it! My CD drive was causing the problem, as soon as I disconnect it I can boot to the hard drive no problems, just need to get another CD drive now! Thanks for the suggestions, it's good to know there is someone out there!

**Harrison** · 13th November 2011, 18:01

Was the cd drive also on the same internal idea port? if so, the port can only run one device unless you add a buffered ide interface, and even with that you need to use the software idefix before you can use the HDD and cd together.