CompuServe Thread

Boot BB from hd floppy

2 messages in this thread
#99561From: Steven WeinsteinMay 13, 1993 2:39 AM
Sorry it took me a couple of days to get back to you. Work required my time for a couple of days. You didn't think I gave up, did you? I don't giv up easy! Yes, I'm running enforcer quiet before binddrivers. I even tried the new version of enforcer. It locked up the machine so I went back to the version that came on the AmigaJanus disk. I tried running enforcer and binddrivers after the high density disk finished booting. As soon as I entered binddrivers the high density df0: drive went crazy. I have 6 meg ram. (4 fast, 2 chip). So, it isn't a memory problem. I do not have this problem when booting eith from a standard density floppy or my Amiga hard drive. Everything functions fine and I can read both standard and high density disks in both Amiga and PC sides when booting from standard floppy or Amiga Hard drive. This problem booting the Bridgeboard only occurs when I try to boot the system from a high density floppy disk. I have a question on a different subject. What do the single and double beeps I hear coming from the bridgeboard speaker mean? Also, do you have a high density floppy on your system? Looking forward to your response. Steve W.
#99616From: Steven D. KapplinMay 13, 1993 3:39 PM
Steve, The beeps are for different things. When the BB starts up it'll beep as a signal that it needs a boot disk in the floppy drive. If none is inserted, then after a specific time period it will try to boot from a hard drive. You may also here a beep when you start to do a dir on a floppy inserted in one of the drives. I run DRDOS 6.0, so that may not happen under MSDOS 5.x Don't give it much thought, the beeps don't generally mean there's anything wrong. I'm truly puzzled by this boot problem. It's odd that the machine will boot from a HD disk as long as you don't have binddrivers in the startup, but will lock otherwise. In my experience if binddrivers failed for any reason it usually meant that Janus.library didn't get loaded. The BB might not work, but it didn't interfere with the boot process. I suppose it's conceivable, though unlikely, that you have bad ROMs. I have the HD floppy on my A3000. When I got the 3000 I immediately installed 2.1 on it even though it had 2.04 already installed. Once I got things working off the hard drive, I then experimented with the floppy to find out if I had a HD floppy. I didn't know until I tried formatting a HD diskette. However, I never had any problem with it. I formatted a HD diskette and then copied over to it the basic files needed to boot the machine from floppy in case the HD went south. But, I don't have a BB installed in it. I have one on order, but my BB is in my 2000 which doesn't have a HD disk in it. So, I don't even have binddrivers on the floppy for the 3000 at this time nor do I ever attempt to boot a BB. However, if BBs ever get delivered, I have one on order and might find out in a few weeks. I remember reading somewhere that Amigados 2.04 did not provide support or provided limited support for HD drives, but that that was fixed with 2.1. There was a utility, HDFixer, on the boards which purported to "fix" the 2.04 bug with the HD drives. But since I've never run the machine with 2.04 I really don't know what that problem is or if HDFixer "fixed" it. Perhaps your best option at this time might be to first boot up from the floppy WITHOUT running binddrivers or enforcer. If the machine will boot from floppy this way, then write a script to run enforcer quiet, then binddrivers AFTER the normal boot. If that works, it may be a kludge, but solves the problem. Right now, Steve, that's the best I can come up with. It ain't much, I know, but frankly I'm a bit stumped. Steve