IDE ZIP drive fails to mount

[Hypex]

Hello. I'm trying to help someone with getting an IDE ZIP drive to work with OS4.1 on an A1/XE. The drive comes up in MediaToolbox but fails to mount.

To my knowledge the DOSDriver is loaded but no disks mount when inserted. The drive has worked on a 68K Amiga with OS3.x.

What woud be the steps taken that should get an IDE ZIP drive to work? The following comes to mind.

1.) Connect hardware.
2.) Confirm working in MTB.
3.) Setup and mount DOSDriver.
4.) Insert disk with compaible ZIP device filesystem.

Have I missed something? It is on the IDE bus so is there some issue with marking it as a last drive? If that was the case. How does MTB deal with a removable last driive? Apart from that all else I can see are Exec device and DOS filesystem problems.

Perhaps I've answered my own questions!

But are there any other known issues? Has anyone testeed an IDE ZIP drive and confirmed it as working ?

[thomasrapp]

3a) make sure that the DOSDriver is set up correctly (right geometry, file system etc.)
3b) make sure that the DOSDriver contains Activate=1 or Mount=1
4a) try cd zip: or diskchange zip: followed by cd zip: (replace zip by the name of the DOSDriver).

5) quote error messages! "does not work" is not an appropriate error descrition.

[Hypex]

Good extra tips Thanks.

I also thoght fomratting a disk would be a good test. If one can be sacrificed.

BTW to what "does not work" are you referring too? I didn't say that in my post.

[xenic]

@Hypex
You could try starting SYS:System/Mounter to see if the drive is being recognized by AmigaDOS.

[abalaban]

@Hypex

I have an A1/XE with a ZIP drive in it. The drive works normally and ZIP floppies are recognized correctly.
In fact the problem is to use old AmigaOS formatted floppies because it was possible to use custom mount lists with exotic disk geometry and properties (IIRC it was even possible under 3.1 to have Amiga formatted ZIP without the need to have the RDB present on the disk itself, which is not possible anymore... at least to my knowledge) thus a ZIP floppy may appear unusable while in fact it's only not mountable (and without an RDB I doubt Mounter will be of any use...) your best bet is to have a DOS formatted ZIP and take it as a reference test.

[thomasrapp]

You can use the same mountlist or DosDriver you used on the classic Amiga on the NG Amiga, too. Like you said you have to make sure to use the same geometry settings. I think I mentioned this already.

It's easier if the ZIP disk is partitioned because then the geometry is stored on the disk. But in this case you might have to reboot whenever you change the disk if the IDE driver does not support removable storage with an RDB.

[Hypex]

Thanks for all the help guys, I'll pass this info along.

That's a good point about IDE not supportijng removable storage. Infact given only Amiga filesystems are supported without DOSDrivers could be another hindrance.

[zappa2009]

Be sure that on the ZIP-Disks is the correct Filesystem.

I must remove PFS3 from the ZIP-Disks before i can use it im my AmigaONE-XE (has a 750MB-IDE-Drive) .

And a 750MB Zip can read from 100 up to 750 but only write to 250 & 750MB Disks.
For write to 100MB-ZIP get a 250-USB-ZIP-Drive

[Spektro]

Has anyone testeed an IDE ZIP drive and confirmed it as working ?

I have but there is a problem
ZIP 100 drive doesn't work with a1ide.device when drive's interrupts are enabled. If you want to use a1ide.device, you have to turn interrupts off. It can be done with Idetool (see command -i).

[Hypex]

Hello I'm back with a report. Good news and bad news.

Last night at the Amiga club I finally got around taking a look at this problem. It involved a new install of OS4 as well as the A1 HD had been taken out and used as a PC RAID drive. Why someone would want to cause suffering to hardware like that I don't know but fortunately another HD was found and put in place.

So once installed I set about setting up the ZIP and ZIC DOS drivers. I found that was quite easy. I set up the device and unit. Ended up rebooting and then inserted a ZIP. It mounted straight up! Makes me wonder why it didn't fail to mount for me as per the subject. It was a 100MB disk and formatted as FAT from what I can tell. It came up as ZIC, the PC driver, with a volume named Empty. ZIP, the FFS driver, showed it as invalid. Good news!

Now, bad news. I tried to copy some files and I started getting errors. Common was device error 20. I then tried to fast format which failed and then a full format which failed even worse. I then got nonsense errors such as "Volume exceeds partition length" and "Object not of required type". I checked the settings and max transfer which seemed okay.

But then...

If you want to use a1ide.device, you have to turn interrupts off.

I tried this and it made all the difference! Thanks so much for the hint.

The only problem now is that turning off interrupts also kills of the CDROM on the same bus. HD is unit 0. CD is unit 2, ZIP unit 3. UBoot detects it but when OS4 loads up there is no CD0 driver. Caused me a load of confusion. Checking cables and what not. So it looks like interrupts for one device can affect another device on the same bus. As you could see putting the ZIP drive on its own bus would be an easy fix.