ACA1234 Installation

Hi, I put in an 8mb CF card on the ACA1234 and I split 2 and 6 mb for partitions. The 6 mb partition seems fine but crashes when I check speed with sysinfo. Is 6 mb too large for it? I am using the Pfs filesystem and dh0: (the 2 mb partition) gets +6 mb sec for speed. Also my internal ide with the 1200 boots before the CF card. Can I boot with the CF card without turning bootable off on the internal ide? Thanks.

Sysinfo crashing is a report we've had before; please note that Sysinfo is not the best piece of software, and the source code has been released to different people who created different forks of it, so it may not have improved over the "new" versions that came out lately.

You might want to try an older version (I use V3.24, but never tried a 6MB PFS3 partition), or a different tool, like DiskSpeed.

I am assuming you're not using "any" version of PFS, but the PFSaio package from Aminet?

Quote from cevoner

Also my internal ide with the 1200 boots before the CF card. Can I boot with the CF card without turning bootable off on the internal ide? Thanks.

That can be done with the options the Amiga system has "aboard" - the boot priority of your boot partitions. Within HDToolbox, click on the boot partition, and then on "advanced", which will open more GUI fields, the boot priority among them.

Normally, all boot partitions have priority 0, and the floppy drive has 5 if I remember right. You can also enter negative numbers, and I'd recommend not going beyond 4 for a CF card partition, as an Amiga that does not boot from an inserted floppy is not very intuitive (you could still boot from floppy using the early startup menu, but again, it's not expected on an Amiga).

Jens

Sysinfo is fine now with a different download. You were right about different forks.

It says 3.24 but comes up as 4.4. Really strange.

Early startup menu works but changing the boot priority still indicates 0 for each partition in HDtoolbox

and I guess the internal IDE takes over. I could set the internal as non-bootable but that is not what I prefer.

Thanks for your insight. The faster harddrive access is a great solution.

Quote from cevoner

Early startup menu works but changing the boot priority still indicates 0 for each partition in HDtoolbox

and I guess the internal IDE takes over. I could set the internal as non-bootable but that is not what I prefer.

You can change the boot priority using HDToolbox, but you really have to press return on every field that you change, and you need to click on "save changes to drive" in the main menu before you exit. Only this will make the change that you've requested: Mount the CF from internal IDE, but prefer to boot from the ACA1234 CF card.

Jens

Jens,

Thanks I did that. The boot priority was changed to -2 on the CF card and 7 on the internal ide of the 1200. The LUN above reads 0 on both drives even with that change. When I make the internal non-bootable neither one boots. It goes into the ACAinstall menu.

I do not want to erase the CF card it so I quit the menu.

I can only boot the CF card on the ACA with the boot startup menu.

Is there something special about your installer? Is there a certain HDtoolbox I should use? I am using the one with 3.2 as I have V3.2.2 workbench with a 3.2 rom. Thank you for your quick replies.

Quote from cevoner

The boot priority was changed to -2 on the CF card and 7 on the internal ide of the 1200.

Just to get the terminology right: By "CF card" you mean the ACA1234 CF slot? I'm asking because I was assuming that you also have a CF card on your internal IDE.

Further, I have my doubts that you see both the CF card of the ACA1234 and the internal IDE at the same time in HDToolbox. That's because the device for talking to the ACA1234 CF card has a different name, which you need to specify in the tooltypes of HDToolbox (single-click on the icon, then choose "information..." from the drop-down menus). The device name for internal IDE is "scsi.device", while the device name for the ACA1234 CF card slot is "aca1234.device".

The easiest way of launching HDToolbox for the ACA1234 CF card slot is to launch it from a command line by just typing "HDToolbox aca1234.device". This is not a "special HDToolbox", but the same HDToolbox, just instructed to look at a different port.

Quote from cevoner

I can only boot the CF card on the ACA with the boot startup menu.

..which means that there is something with a higher boot prio than 0 in the system. That 7 number you're mentioning above irritates me - this will for sure be higher than the standard "0" that the CF card on the ACA1234 has, so it's expected that the computer won't start from it, because there is something else with a higher priority in the system. I recommend to set all boot priorities that you see when normally double-clicking on HDToolbox to 0 or lower.

Quote from cevoner

The LUN above reads 0 on both drives even with that change.

LUN stands for "logical unit number" and has nothing to do with boot priority. It's a designator for making a difference between the physical drive and a logical unit, which a physical drive may have more than one of. Seldomly used, so it's safe to ignore.

Jens

You had everything correct. I load HDtoolbox separately for each drive. I just changed the tooltypes in one to your card. I have it booting the CF (on the ACA1234) now with a setting of 2 on the boot priority and 0 on the internal IDE.

I had my boot priorities numbers reversed. However, Sysinfo still crashes on the 6 MB partition. I can't find an earlier version. It is just buggy as you said. I probably have an earlier version in my old files. I might report it to the Sysinfo people. Thank you for your patience. A great card. You should try a 68040 but they are scarcer chips I expect. The 68030 works great in your design. Thanks.

Quote from cevoner

You had everything correct. I load HDtoolbox separately for each drive. I just changed the tooltypes in one to your card. I have it booting the CF (on the ACA1234) now with a setting of 2 on the boot priority and 0 on the internal IDE.

I had my boot priorities numbers reversed. However, Sysinfo still crashes on the 6 MB partition. I can't find an earlier version. It is just buggy as you said. I probably have an earlier version in my old files. I might report it to the Sysinfo people. Thank you for your patience. A great card. You should try a 68040 but they are scarcer chips I expect. The 68030 works great in your design. Thanks.

All is good Jen. I located Sysinfo 3.24 and no more buggy crashes. Thank you for your updates.