how can i tell if my amiga has detected a second hard drive

[ratfink]

Actually I don't really know how to word this.

I have an amiga 2000, it has a scsi drive. I can attach a flash drive via a sequence of adapters, to the scsi cable [on a gvp hc+8 2000]]. One of those devices is a scsi-lvd bridge that I got from merlin. So in theory the amiga MIGHT be able to use the flash drive. Or I could try to connect an IDE drive. Or if all else fails, get another SCSI drive and connect that!

I boot my amiga up. How do I tell if it can "see" the extra hard drive? Should it appear on the screen as an icon on workbench? Do I have to set something up in the startup script? Is there a tool for adding or even detecting new hardware?

Help please!

edit - come to think of it, can the gvp hc+8 i am using even support more than 1 drive being connected to it?

 

[fitzsteve]

Hi!

Short answer is yes your SCSI device can support more drives, SCSI however can be a little bit tricky to setup and needs a little bit of reserach regarding SCSI ID's and termination, that being said there's no harm in loading up HDToolBox to see if your flash card is detected.

So here's what you need to do, in your Tools drawer you should have HDToolBox, this wont detect real SCSI devices unless you make a small change to one of the tooltypes.

Now I believe the GVP uses 'gvpscsi.device' so you need to right click on the HDToolBox Icon and navigate to the 'tooltypes' tab. You will see 'scsi.decice' as one of the settings, you need to edit this line to 'gvpscsi.device' make sure you press 'enter' after you make the edit or the changes will not be saved!

Now when you run HDToolBox if you are lucky you should see your original HDD as the first device and your flash card as another device*

Should that be the case you can go ahead and prepare your flash card just like you would another HDD. Please be careful not to accidentally destroy your HDD's partitions or destroy data that you want to keep that might already be on the flash card, creating a new RDB or new partitions via HDToolBox completely destroys any data already on that drive, so you have been warned!

Good luck

*if you didn't see the flash card it could be for a number of reasons such as incorrect termination, conflict in scsi ID's or even something simple like you forgot to add molex power to the SCSI-IDE bridge or CF adapter

 

[ratfink]

Thanks, very informative!

After realising I could scroll right icard I've managed to find HDToolBox, but it shows "driver not installed".

Under rightclick-Information for HDToolBox, there's nothing in Tool Types.

I'm using Directory Opus... I have DH0, DH1, RAM and C:. I guess RAM is a ramdisk and DH0 and DH1 are partitions on my hard drive. C just seems to be a pointer to the C folder on DH0.

I have found a file that refers to gvpscsi.device, called DH0_mountlist. DH0_mountlist refers to DH0A: and DH1A.

In DH0 folder S, I have Startup-sequence which uses BindDrivers [if that makes any difference].

Feels like this amiga maybe isn't set up right?

 

[fitzsteve]

So we can help your further can you tell us:

What version of Workbench you are using
What the specs of your Amiga are (i.e model. total ram, any other expansions)
Kickstart Rom version
How are you scsi devices connected and what ID's have you set and if you have them terminated i.e:

GVP Controller
|
|
HDD
|
|
SCSI-IDE Bridge
|
|
Terminator


Your devices might have their own termination so check the jumper settings but also you need to read up on setting up a SCSI chain as this will help you a lot!

http://www.2ndchancepc.co.uk/basic-scsi-faq.html

---------- Post added at 19:20 ---------- Previous post was at 19:14 ----------

Also if you have the manual for your GVP it's well worth reading it, if not you might be able to download a copy here:

http://amiga-manuals.xiik.net/amiga.php

GVP have their own setup Disk for HDD's, etc but you can still do it with HDToolBox like I said in my first post

 

[UberFreak]

Since the GVP has its own scsi device driver, you should point HDToolBox to it with the following tooltype (AFAIR):

SCSI_DEVICE_NAME=gvpscsi.device

There should also be a tooltype that tells it to ask you to select the device driver, but cant remember what it is now

 

[ratfink]

Ok - many thanks fitzsteve and uberfreak, looks like I am getting there !

I finally got round to looking at the amiga again tonight. I added the tool type SCSI_DEVICE_NAME=gvpscsi.device to the HDToolBox tool, and now when I open HDToolBox my maiin hard drive is identified as a Maxtor on SCSI 0 with two partitions called DH0 and DH1, and there is a second drive with SCSI ID 1 but an unknown drive type. Can't take the computer apart right now but I will do so soon and fiddle with the SCSI ID for the flash card just to make sure this is what the SCSI ID 1 device is. Not that there's anything else it can be I guess.

Anyhow, assuming it is now picking up the compact flash card, the drive settings it picks up by reading the drive configuration make it only around 200mb though in fact it's either a 1gb or a 2gb drive. I also get a message that it's not a disk [type 5]. I'll have to try the card in a PC to see how it's set up - but if it's set up for a PC already will it need reformatting for the amiga or should it "just work" if it's going to work at all?