Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!clyde.concordia.ca!uunet!van-bc!rsoft!mindlink!a218
From: a218@mindlink.UUCP (Charlie Gibbs)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga.tech
Subject: 360K drive on an AT bridge board
Message-ID: <985@mindlink.UUCP>
Date: 21 Jan 90 14:55:47 GMT
Organization: MIND LINK! - British Columbia, Canada
Lines: 41


     A while ago I posted a message describing my troubles getting
a 360K drive to work with my AT bridge board.  I have since found
what's making it fail (if not why) and come up with a work-around.

     For those of you who are just joining us, I wanted to replace
the 1.2-megabyte drive that came with the bridge board with a 360K
drive, since I exchange data with machines having 360K drives and
don't want to take a chance of causing errors when the 1.2-megabyte
drive's narrower head tries to write over the wide tracks written
by a 360K drive.  The 360K drive gave me various problems, usually
not recognizing disk changes and sometimes locking up the bridge
board completely.  Nothing I tried would make it work.

     It turns out that the problem is caused by the 30-megabyte
hard card (Seagate ST-138R) which I had added for the exclusive
use of the bridge board (the autoboot partition on the Amiga's
hard disk was far too slow for serious software development).
If I booted from a floppy disk, or removed the hard card and booted
from the autoboot partition on the Amiga side, the 360K drive works
just fine.  However, I have come across a work-around even when
booting from the hard card.  If, the first time I try to access the
360K drive after booting, there is no disk in the drive, I'll get
the standard "drive not ready" message from MS-DOS.  If I then
insert a disk and have it retry, everything works OK.  I can live
with this; it's certainly preferable to giving up my hard card.

     Another minor problem I've had with the hard card is that the
time doesn't come up properly when I boot.  The minutes and seconds
are always set to zero, so the system always thinks I'm booting on
the hour.  For instance, if I re-boot the bridge board at 2:35, the
clock is set to 2:00:00.  If I pull out the bridge board, the time
comes up correctly.

     If anyone else has tried a hard card on an AT bridge board I'd
appreciate hearing your experiences.  (Of course, I'd appreciate it
even more if someone could tell me why all this is happening in the
first place.  :-)

Charlie_Gibbs@mindlink.UUCP
For every vision there is an equal and opposite revision.