bbs00068@uafcseg.uucp (Joel Kolstad) (12/31/90)
OK... well, I got my ATOnce board, and it's nice. Too bad it slows the Amiga side down by a half, though... Anyway, I'm trying to give the MS-DOS side its own partition. I can do the "MS-DOS partition in a file" method fine, and it works great, but... as the documentation says, it's slower than giving ATOnce all of a device as its partition. So, I backed up by hard drive (Xetec Fasttrak w/Seagate drive), redid the partitions, formatted them again, and put enough stuff on to get the system up and running. BOOT:, DH0:, and DH1: were all there, and Amiga DOS was happy using them all. (Boot transfers control to dh0, which uses the fast file system. dh1 I intend to turn into c:...) Boot: got cylinders 1-1, dh0: got 246-566, and dh1: got 567-811. And, yes, I did run the "AT Configure" program to tell it that C:->dh1:. It seemed happy enough... So... off to booting the MS-DOS 4.00 install program. It runs... FDISKs C: (which it properly sees as the 10 megs I had it partitioned too), and then attempts to format it. Oops! "Bad media type or illegal track 0 on drive C: -- format terminated" Hmm... Interestingly enough, though, DOS install keeps on going. It installs the rest of DOS (after giving me two "General errors -- retry?" Retry works fine...), and I reboot the system. MS-DOS shell comes up fine. Hmm... I think... could everything be OK? Well, no, it isn't! Upon getting a DOS prompt, I do a DIR of drive C: What a mess! There's autoexec.bat, config.sys, command.com, and the subdir DOS like there should be, but also LOTS of illegal filesnames, subdirectories, and other totally bogus entries. I attempted to just do a DOS format c: /s again after booting off of floppies, but I kep on getting the same error message. I can use C: for awhile, but eventually DOS gives me a "Invalid FAT" message -- which is understandable! Chkdsk /f doesn't help much in that it, too, eventually gives up with an "Invalid FAT" message. I can't just DELete or RemoveDir the garbage because they almost all contain illegal characters. Arggh... Tomorrow, I hope to let Norton have a look at it... but I still really want to know: HOW DO I PROPERLY FORMAT C:!?!? I followed the manual just like it said to, and it's really frustrating that it ALMOST but NOT QUITE works!!! Can anyone help me? I'd appreciate it! Also -- does anyone know if the makers of ATOnce (Vortex, I think... box isn't here right now) are on the net? I hadn't planned on giving my Xmas money to AT&T to pay for overseas calls to Germany. :-) Thanks in advance to those who can help. Please respond to the 'net or kolstad@cae.wisc.edu -- NOT this public access account; it'll bounce! ---Joel Kolstad kolstad@cae.wisc.edu
W_TROIA@upr1.upr.cun.edu (Paolo V. Troia) (12/31/90)
In article <5773@uafhp.uark.edu>, Joel Kolstad <bbs00068@uafcseg.uucp> writes: >Also -- does anyone know if the makers of ATOnce (Vortex, I think... box >isn't here right now) are on the net? I hadn't planned on giving my Xmas >money to AT&T to pay for overseas calls to Germany. :-) In the December's Amiga World there's an ad for ATonce (p.113) that gives a Compuserve mailbox "for product and technical information". The mailbox is 100016,2545. As has been posted by others before, you can reach Compuserve mailboxes from the net by using the form: ######.####@compuserve.com, so their address would be: 100016.2545@compuserve.com I haven't tried this myself, so I'm not sure if it'll actually work... Good luck! -------------------------------------------------------------------------- Paolo V. Troia | Universidad de Puerto Rico | // Amiga w_troia@upr1.upr.clu.edu | Recinto Universitario de Mayaguez | \X/ o nada! --------------------------------------------------------------------------