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Just taking a close look at my uboot variables, and I came across this:

According to the venerable Amiga Auckland page http://www.titan.co.nz/amigaak/AA020816.htm#mubt menuboot_cmd should be "ide reset; boota; boota; boota". However, on my machine it's only "boota; boota; boota".

Does anyone have any ideas on why it would've been changed to leave out the ide reset?

My A1 is second hand, I don't think I changed this variable. I'm using roughly the same set-up as the previous owner, with a HD on a 0680 card. Originally they had a HD on Primary Master and CD on Secondary Master, I've added another HD on Primary Slave and replaced the CD with a DVDRW.

daveyw wrote:According to the venerable Amiga Auckland page http://www.titan.co.nz/amigaak/AA020816.htm#mubt menuboot_cmd should be "ide reset; boota; boota; boota". However, on my machine it's only "boota; boota; boota".

We now have that information on the doc wiki at http://wiki.amigaos.net/index.php/UserDoc:BIOS

The "ide reset" is really optional. If it works fine without a reset then don't bother changing it. The "boota; boota; boota..." is required because you need one "boota" for each boot device you have defined (boot1, boot2, boot3).

Thanks for the reply Steve.

I gave it a go with ide reset and no difference. I had a vague hope it would fix my problems with my second HD not being able to operate at full speed, but no such luck.

daveyw wrote:Thanks for the reply Steve.

I gave it a go with ide reset and no difference. I had a vague hope it would fix my problems with my second HD not being able to operate at full speed, but no such luck.

Operate at full speed...

...while in UBoot?

You can change the xfer setting of that drive to use the highest possible speed (this will be set and used in the OS aswell)

...under Workbench?

If you aren't able to set xfer you can still use an external program (i forgot the name) to set the speed of the hdd which will kick in on loading the OS

Raziel wrote:
You can change the xfer setting of that drive to use the highest possible speed (this will be set and used in the OS aswell)

...under Workbench?

If you aren't able to set xfer you can still use an external program (i forgot the name) to set the speed of the hdd which will kick in on loading the OS

Yes, I can change the UDMA mode, I can set it all the way up to UDMA 133 like the drive says it supports... however, if I set it anything above UDMA 16, during certain IO operations the whole system will lock up.

My main drive (a Seagate) works fine at its full speed (UDMA 100), but this second drive (a WD) can't handle the faster UDMA settings it claims to support.

daveyw wrote:

Raziel wrote:
You can change the xfer setting of that drive to use the highest possible speed (this will be set and used in the OS aswell)

...under Workbench?

If you aren't able to set xfer you can still use an external program (i forgot the name) to set the speed of the hdd which will kick in on loading the OS

Yes, I can change the UDMA mode, I can set it all the way up to UDMA 133 like the drive says it supports... however, if I set it anything above UDMA 16, during certain IO operations the whole system will lock up.

My main drive (a Seagate) works fine at its full speed (UDMA 100), but this second drive (a WD) can't handle the faster UDMA settings it claims to support.

Ah, yes, ok

If you are on an XE (i'm assuming) you shouldn't go over 100 even if it claims to support it.

I have two 133 HDDs built in aswell and was lucky to get read/write errors right in UBoot when using them with that setting.
Going back to UDMA 5 (i think? 100) both work perfectly fine.

For me it wasn't wrong information of the drives (because they work full speed in a PC) but a limitation of the XE hardware which can't cope with more than 100.

Have you tried to set your drive to the UDMA speed, that is beneath the highest setting?

daveyw wrote:My main drive (a Seagate) works fine at its full speed (UDMA 100), but this second drive (a WD) can't handle the faster UDMA settings it claims to support.

No surprise there. I never had any luck with WD drives myself. It could be the firmware in the drive that is at fault. Do a Google search for that drive model along with the word "blacklist" and if anything pops up then toss the drive and get something better.

Raziel wrote: If you are on an XE (i'm assuming) you shouldn't go over 100 even if it claims to support it.

I have two 133 HDDs built in aswell and was lucky to get read/write errors right in UBoot when using them with that setting.
Going back to UDMA 5 (i think? 100) both work perfectly fine.

For me it wasn't wrong information of the drives (because they work full speed in a PC) but a limitation of the XE hardware which can't cope with more than 100.

Have you tried to set your drive to the UDMA speed, that is beneath the highest setting?

Yes, it's an A1-XE. When you say a limitation of the XE hardware, do you mean the PCI bus? Because my drives are connected to an 0680 PCI card, not the motherboard IDE.

I've tried all the UDMA settings. UDMA 16 seems to be the most stable.

ssolie wrote: No surprise there. I never had any luck with WD drives myself. It could be the firmware in the drive that is at fault. Do a Google search for that drive model along with the word "blacklist" and if anything pops up then toss the drive and get something better.

It's been trouble since the day I got it. I took it home from the shop, connected it up, partitioned & quicked formatted it, then went to copy a whole lot of data across. It would go fine for a while, then throw up a "General Device Failure. The disk is in an unreadable format" error. Took it back to the store, the guy ran a Windows diagnostic on it and pronounced it fine. So I've soldiered on with it since then.

I could try re-cabling it. At the moment the two HDs are on one port and the DVD on the second. (And before you ask, yes, the 1st HD is set to master and the 2nd to slave). I could separate the two HDs. But there are problems with physical lengths of cable that would require a major swap around.

When the weather cools down a bit and I have some time, I plan on replacing the PATA set-up with SATA. I bought a 2 TB Seagate Barracuda last week.

daveyw wrote:

Raziel wrote: If you are on an XE (i'm assuming) you shouldn't go over 100 even if it claims to support it.

I have two 133 HDDs built in aswell and was lucky to get read/write errors right in UBoot when using them with that setting.
Going back to UDMA 5 (i think? 100) both work perfectly fine.

For me it wasn't wrong information of the drives (because they work full speed in a PC) but a limitation of the XE hardware which can't cope with more than 100.

Have you tried to set your drive to the UDMA speed, that is beneath the highest setting?

Yes, it's an A1-XE. When you say a limitation of the XE hardware, do you mean the PCI bus? Because my drives are connected to an 0680 PCI card, not the motherboard IDE.

I've tried all the UDMA settings. UDMA 16 seems to be the most stable.

Yes, i meant the PCI bus...and unfortunately it doesn't matter if you plug it to a PCI card that *can* work with those speeds as the bus will act up aswell once the data gets there.

I had the very same setup.
sil0680 and a 133 hdd plugged in, it errored once uboot accessed the drive, sometimes i was able to reach the kick module loading, but i never made it to workbench, far too much read/write errors to be useable

If you say "UDMA 16 *seems* to be the most stable" i fear i'll second Steven on his opinion to switch drives.
If it's only "mostly" stable you never know when it will kill some important data later on