I'v got an Amiga 500 with two hard drives and a CD drive. All are hooked up via a DataFlyer 500 controller. I've formatted the hard drives and installed Workbench 1.3 on one, but the machine won't boot when the other hard drive (which doesn't have Workbench or anything else on it) is disconnected. Both were formatted using the DataFlyer formatting utility, which also was used to install Workbench on one of the drives. I set the boot priority to some negative value for the non-Workbench drive, but I'm still getting the Kickstart screen when I turn off or unplug it.

    In addition, the DataFlyer utility will freeze the computer really nastily when I run it with the CD drive connected. It'll get to it's SCSI ID and sit there forever with the cursor stuck and the floppy access light on. I haven't installed a driver of any sort for the CD drive; could this be causing it? Confounding the issue further, I can only seem to run the DataFlyer utility when I boot from the DataFlyer setup disk.

    Is there a better way to format the hard drives? Is there at least a way to make it boot from the main hard disk even if the extra one is turned off or disconnected?

Crikey, having never had an HDD setup on my A500 it's difficult to advise here, other than to suggest unplugging everything and checking SCSI ID settings etc.

Sorry to ask a dumb question, but you say drive 1 won't boot if drive 2 is disconnected, right?

And plugging in the CD-ROM causes the machine to freeze?

Hmmm.  You do say that you can't run the dataflyer utility unless you boot from the floppy.  Have you installed the dataflyer program to the Workbench HDD?  If it's not in the startup script then chances are the program isn't running after bootup.

The only other thing to check (I'm a SCSI novice) is that the correct SCSI standard is being used on all drives.  If the dataflyer supports SCSI II (or whatever it is) then you might check that all the drives attached in the chain are the same standard?

Sorry for the crap advice, but it's all I can really think of!

Hey!  I remember my A500 DataFlyer controller.  :-)

In addition to the things noted above, one special item to note is that the DataFlyer doesn't implement auto-booting in exactly the standard RDB way.  The setup copies a couple files to the drive, and if you re-org or disconnect the drive that contains those files, you'll lose the ability to auto-boot until you re-run your DataFlyer utility.  I never ran mine with more than one HD, but it MAY be possible that the auto-boot data files are getting written to the drive you're disconnecting.  I seem to recall hearing that happen, before.  (So, really, your external drive could act as "boot" and then turn over control to the highest-boot pri partition.  Of course, if you disconnected your external, the system wouldn't have the needed files, and would sit and wait for a boot disk.  These symptoms also fit your problem.)

As for your other questions -- Yes.  You should boot only from the DataFlyer floppy disk when making changes to a drive connected to the DataFlyer.  Otherwise severe data corruption in the auto-boot code written to the hard drive could occur.

I think the hang-on-CDROM-detected was fixed in a newer version of the DataFlyer software.  You can use any DataFlyer Prep driver disks that have A500/2000 SCSI support.  (including the newer IDE/SCSI dual cards)  Maybe you might want to scour the web for a newer version?

The Dataflyer 500 can be prepped with HDToolBox and will function just like any other standard RDB drive.

I think it may depend somewhat on which revision DF you have, and on the Kickstart rev of your Amiga.  Certainly for autobooting on a Kickstart 1.2/1.3 you couldn't use a stock prep tool...  

I don't remember RDB working on AmigaOS 2.1, either, though.  (But I might not have tried it.)  Sold my complete A500 rig well before 3.1 came out, so I can't speak to that one.

    I'm using the latest version of the setup disk I can find, which is 3.7E. Is there a later version? Where could I find it?