CompuServe Messages

Norm, Ouch! This doesn't sound too good and I'm not sure I can help you, especially since I'm not totally sure I am interpreting your words correctly <grin>! Somewhere near 4096 different images have crossed my mind about what you may be doing and what could be wrong. I think it would be easier if I just explained how and why I do things and let you work from that. First, if you are going to use removeable media, make darn sure all your cartridges are "prepped" with identical layout geometry (partition sizes – start/end cylinders; file system; masks; etc.). I always do this cartridge prepping after I eject any cartridge from the drive and warm reboot (three finger salute) so that any residual RDB info is flushed from the system. After the system reboots, I insert a cart and let it spin up. You should not see any icons on your screen from this procedure because the RDB is only read at startup. If icons do appear, then you have a mountlist entry somewhere in your system which I would encourage you to disable – let the RDB do its job! Once the cart has spun up, its time to use HDToolBox's magic. Once you've selected the appropriate SCSI device/address for your Bernoulli, you can use `Change Drive Type' to make sure the major factors of your drive's geometry are consistently setup (just select the Bernoulli entry you must have previously created). This will establish the drives high and low cyclinders, mask values, file system type, etc. What it doesn't do however, is set up your partitions, which you must set up through the `Partition Drive' option. I recommend that you set up the entire drive as a single partition since this way you can avoid the headaches of not matching up partition end/start cylinders between carts! Second, if you boot your system with different carts inserted at any particular time, make darn sure all your carts have a RDB on them. There are not too many things more fun than trying to figure out what happened to all that important data you put on a cart when your system cold boots and you don't get a disk icon on the workbench! The way to make sure sure you save a RDB on a prepped cart, is immediately after you do the items I outlined above to create identical drive geometry, use the `Save Changes to Drive' option before quiting HDToolBox. Now for the ultimate test of your handy work: wait a few seconds after quiting HDToolBox and perform the three finger salute. Your system should reboot and a new disk icon should be on your Workbench which you can now perform the AmigaDOS format on! If I understand some of the problems you reported correctly, it sounds like you are suffering from problems the above should solve: missing RDBs and improper drive geometry between carts. I don't know what error 254 is — can't find it in any documentation I have 🙁 You're right, I didn't receive an "Amiga Hard Drive" booklet with my OS3.1 upgrade either! Of course, I'm not too concerned since I've had lots of practice with OS2.1, which did include the hard drive booklet <grin>. Perhaps you can find an Amigain or Amiga User Group close to you that will give you an opportunity to look at the booklet… EdV