Buddha and HDToolBox - Drive not visible

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Don't Panic. Please wash hands.
  • I have a Buddha IDE with a 120 Gb drive installed in my system (A2000 with kickstart 3.1). I used the installer, and wb 3.1 was installed fine - 2 partitions were made.


    My question is, HDToolBox does not recognize any drive when I launch it.

    Why is that?

  • Select the HDToolbox icon, goto Icon menu and select Information. Here, the SCSI_DEVICE_NAME=scsi.device has been changed to SCSI_DEVICE_NAME=buddhascsi.device (or "budda_atapi.device") The name depends on which firmware version you have installed in the Buddha flash rom.

  • The name depends on which firmware version you have installed in the Buddha flash rom.

    All new controllers are shipped with the latest one, which also fixes the "large harddrives" bug. So the device name is buddhascsi.device.


    Please note that the old software by Elaborate Bytes uses the standard name "scsi.device", so it works out of the box (pun intended) with HDtoolbox. However, this bears the danger of patcher programs attempting to apply patches because they assume that it's a device by Commodore. We therefore decided to go with a unique name, knowing that not many people will want to use HDtoolbox anyway. And those who do will surely not mind changing an icon tooltype. Well, I hope you don't :-)

  • I have to say the application, from a GUI/usability perspective, is not very intuitive.

    HDToolbox is part of the original OS and dates back to the release of Kickstart/Workbench 2.0, about 29 years ago. It has become common during the haydays of the Amiga to build mass-storage controllers in a way that harddrives can be partitioned with the "original tool", and that's HDToolbox. Back then, partitioning a drive (and computing in general) was not as easy as it is with today's computers.


    You are right that this tool is not easy to handle, especially because partitioning a drive is nothing that you would do on a recent computer. That's the reason why the Buddha controller comes with an installation procedure that lets you skip this step completely. The Buddha controller and the ACA500plus are the only devices for the Amiga that have such an easy installation procedure.


    Please also note that HDToolbox cannot handle drives that are larger than 4GB. If you partition your 120G drive with HDToolbox, you will most likely destroy data on the other partitions. I recommend to use HDInstTool, which is available from Aminet:


    http://aminet.net/package/disk/misc/hdinst


    This can serve as a replacement of HDToolbox, and it supports formatting partitions beyond the 4G barrier.


    If you also want the partition size and available free space display to be correct, then your best chance is to buy OS3.1.4 from Hyperion - it's the official follow-up OS and one of the main features is full support of large harddrives.

  • The last reply was more than 365 days ago, this thread is most likely obsolete. It is recommended to create a new thread instead.