CompuServe Messages

Please note that I didn't say the drive should be ready to transfer data by this time, only that it should respond to a bus request. All the drive needs to do is to respond to a unit ready check with a 'I'm busy, check me again later' response. The failing drives simply act as if they aren't even there, which the Amiga accepts and continues on. With that, the system won't cold boot off of the affected drive. The '1fe00' is actually 255 sectors x 512 bytes/sector. I don't know how much you know about the development/production process, but I can tell you that the manuals are usually completed at _least_ a month prior to the product being ready to ship in order to allow time for printing. And yes, engineers do design to the spec, without specifications the chances of anything working are slim to none. The only generic solution to the problems you experienced is to make the machine wait for 30 seconds additional on a powerup regardless of the configuration, and to reduce overall performance from 1+Mbyte/sec transfer rates to 100K/sec on all systems regardless of what the hardware might be capable of. I'm sorry, but that is a solution that I and quite a number of other Amiga users would not find palatable.