| From: | Nick Lamburn |
| Date: | 26 Aug 2000 at 11:44:51 |
| Subject: | Re: Another problem... :( |
Hi David
>> Anyhow, hopefully someone here can help...
>
> I've only got a parrallel one, but hope some of this might be useful.
Anything will help! :)
>> 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.
As noted in the below statements i made, yes :) It crashes when IDEFix is
loaded whether the dosdriver is active or not on insertion of a zip disk.
Is this related to the zip disks being bad perhaps?
>> 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.
Ok...
>> 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.
It so happens I was tesing it really, also one of them as to be Mac
formatted, for which i have CrossMac - though i can't quite see why it has
to be Macintosh HFS when MS-DOS format would do (all Mac's should have
PCExchnage installed :) - but i digress whatever format it is, it fails.
(That can be with a FFS RDB HDToolbox style prep, FFS, (or even OFS i
guess), CrossDOS and CrossMAC)
> 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.
The docs seem to only be bothered with previous version history :( Itried
to see if IDEFix had any parameters with C:IDEFix ? but that resulted in a
nice guru requester.... :-(
>> 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.
If you have SCSI or IDE drives with the cable the wrong way around, the
light will stay on, but I meant the lights stay on and on and on when a zip
disk is insered, that is the hard disk and zip drive. If either cable
connection was the wrong way round, then the miggy wouldn't boot, so they
have to be....
>> 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.
That sounds about right since using format in System results in either Seek
Failure or Can't Write Track 0.
>> 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.
If I get time today I'll have a go :)
>> 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 :)
I stated earlier that i cannot afford nor would want to buy IDEFix at the
price it is if it won't sort the problem, mainly it's a case of money tbh
and a reluctance to spend out more on computers...
>> 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 :)
I dread the day :)
Regards
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