Need help with Elbox 4xEIDE99

[Desverger]

I recently installed at 4xEIDE99 in my amiga 1200 and have some questions:

1) How do I change PIO modes?

2) I already have OS3.9 installed. Is there anyway that I can use the software drivers without using the setup program to split the drives? I have a 20G drive and have my OS partition as 1G and the rest as one big partition. I would like to leave it this way and not split it.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

[Thomas]

AFAIK all the features you are talking about do not apply to the EIDE99. It is only a 4way adapter which allows you to connect four instead of two devices. There is no way to choose PIO mode or to activate split mode. You need a FastATA to do this.

If you have a FastATA, you can change the PIO modes by running the FastATAPrefs program. This only works if you have added the fastata.driver to your startup-sequence.

Split mode is automatically deactivated if the HDD is already partitioned with big partitions. You can manually change the split mode with the FastATAPrefs, too.

You can run the FastATAPrefs after a reset if you hold down the left mouse button.

Bye,
Thomas

[Desverger]

From reading the docs it does come with software that will bypass scsi.device and allow use of big drives, bla bla. I installed the software and the machine would lock shortly after going into WB. I then removed the lines from the SS and it works again. Do I need to run the software at all? What benefit does it give me to do so?

[golem]

I have an EIDE buffered interface and I remember it was a pain getting it to work with OS3.9 but it does work!
IIRC you can only recognise the harddrive by running the software but you have to SKIP ROMUPDATES or some such stuff
in the SetPatch? It is all documented on the OS3.9 CD and explicitly mentions what you need to do with 4xEIDE to get
it to work (translation not very good though).
I have no access to my mig at the moment (at work) but if I see you have no resolution by Saturday I'll post again.

[Daedalus]

The version of scsi.device that comes with OS3.9 Boing Bag 2 does support large drives natively so you won't need the EIDE software installed. However, if it's not installed you will have a problem trying to access the secondary channel. I have that setup, and the EIDE 99 software is really designed for older versions of the OS. I use the OS3.9 BB2 scsi.device, and atapi.device for the secondary channel, and that works just fine. You can try setting it to "no split" but you'll have to reinstall the drive with the latest HDToolbox and reformat to be able to use it again, and even then it might be problematic. You sure your boot partition is entirely within the first 2GB of the drive? It needs to be to load the OS updates. If you use the "SKIPROMMODULES scsi.device" argument on Setpatch you'll be able to use the EIDE software, but it'll have to be split I think unless you use a different filesystem. Your crashes are some conflict caused by misconfiguration of the system, maybe the new scsi.device and the EIDE software fighting, or trying to read partitions that appear to have "moved" on the disk due to changing software settings or something.