AmigaActive (1648/2059)

From:David McMinn
Date:25 Aug 2000 at 11:47:43
Subject:Re: Another problem... :(

> Anyhow, hopefully someone here can help...

I've only got a parrallel one, but hope some of this might be useful.

> I have two zip disks here, obviously 100MB ones, and I place one in
> the zip
> drive. Please note no dos drivers have yet been started./ /I have
> downloaded
> the 'Zip Standard' package from Aminet.

I'm using the Zip standard thing too, works fine here. Anyway, I
digress, have you tried starting the dosdriver before sticking a disk
in? I use IDEFix too, and my system will not boot if I load the CD
(slave on channel 1) dosdriver with a disk in it.

> Place the Zip disk in, the activity light goes on on the zip drive
> then off.

That's the Zip drive recognising a disk has been inserted. Normally,
if you have the dosdriver loaded, it'll go off for about a second and
then it'll come back on again as the Amiga reads stuff from it.

> When the 'ZIP0' driver has been started and device is set to
> 'scsi.device'
> and unit to '1' - the same thing occurs, a crash. Lastly when
> ZIP0's device
> is set to 'atapi.device' and unit '1', it does the same thing.

Why are you using ZIP0 (not that I'm saying you can't or it's bad to)?
I find it a lot easier to use the ZPC driver and just keep all the
disks in PC format. Makes it a lot easier for moving between
computers.

In the ZipStandard docs it says you should disable the IDEFix
superfloppy stuff. I don't know how to do this as I've never looked at
it, but perhaps something like this is causing the problem.

> When i disabled 'IDEFix' in startup-sequence - instead of the crash
> the hard
> disk and zip drive lights stays on and on and on... Attempting to

Do hard drive lights stay on when you've got the IDE cable in the
wrong way? I'm sure it means something like that. Floppy drives do it
too.

> prep the
> zip disk with HDToolBox resulted in errors 3, 29 and 30 (the latter
> mostly).
> Which was emmensely helpful... ;)

If its the same values as the includes & autodocs (and this is
quessing) then 29 means no disk inserted, 30 is "can't find track 0"
and I'm not sure what 3 is. Which is about as helpful.

> My A1200T has a IDE Splitter; could it possibly work in there? It's
> just
> that in that I have two IDE hard disks on unit 0 and 1, and it took
> me ages
> to get them to work together so i don't want to tamper with the
> jumpers, and

The master unit should work by itself or with any other slave unit,
the slave shouldn't affect it at all. So just rip out the slave, don't
tamper with any settings on the master or the slave you just took out.
Stick the Zip drive in as the slave.

> as I understand it; IDEFix '97 demo only allows hard disks and
> removable
> media on Unit 0 and 1. How bloody typical....

Yeah, I think so. But then what would be the point in allowing you
access to all 4 devices without registering? No-one would. Would be
funny if the second IDE channel had a 30 minute timeout in the demo :)

> everything i try to do ends up going wrong, I though computing was
> meant to be a pleasure sometimes; not a chore.... :/

it's the little things like this that stop us getting complacent about
computer use. Trust nothing electronic! It'll be even worse when they
have minds of their own :)

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