schilli@ss4 (Burkhard Schillinger) (02/04/91)
had been running two hard disks in my Sidecar for quite a long time without any problems, each both with PC and Amiga partitions. Now, I found a bigger hard disk, 42 MB, which would give 65 MB when formatted with my RLL controller, and I decided to replace one of the other two HD's. The remaining one was 30 MB, and I decided to give 75 MB to the Amiga and 20 MB to the PC, but no avail. The Amiga would, by all means, not let me create correct Amiga partitions on both HD's. Either, the bigger HD would show up only 2/3 of the expected capacity, or the smaller one would not work at all. After on day and one night of trying, I found out the following: The first two hard disks both had four heads, the new one has six. While the PC controller has no problems maintaining two different hd's, the janus software is buggy. The number of cylinders is being passed on correctly, but the software only reads the number of heads of the first partition on the first hd on the controller and assumes all further partitions to have the same number of heads. This happens in all cases for the FIRST hd on the PC controller, so you can't simply take the smaller hd for the PC only and put the Amiga hd as the second hd on the controller. As the PC can only boot from the first, not from the second hd, I set up a 1MB boot partition for the PC on the bigger hd, connected it as the first hd, and wrote an AUTOEXEC.BAT which will pass control to the second HD, from which the PC will run further on. Not very elegant, and still I cannot use the second HD also for the Amiga. I think I'll use ATWrite and AREAD/AWRITE quite a lot in the future. I have one of the first releases of the new Janus software which came out with the AT board. Did anybody also experience this problem, or does anyone know if this bug, if Commodore is even aware of it, has been fixed in the meantime? -Burkhard
peterk@cbmger.UUCP (Peter Kittel GERMANY) (02/05/91)
In article <schilli.665666130@ss4> schilli@ss4 (Burkhard Schillinger) writes: > > had been running two hard disks in my Sidecar for quite a long > time without any problems, each both with PC and Amiga partitions. > Now, I found a bigger hard disk, 42 MB, which would give 65 MB when > formatted with my RLL controller, Perhaps already this is the problem. From day 1 we got reports about difficulties when using an RLL disk. All these errors were not well reproducible, and in ca. 50 % of the cases, also RLL works fine. So there is no real idea until now what's really happening there. We simply recommend to not use RLL drives :-). > While the PC controller has no problems maintaining two different hd's, > the janus software is buggy. The number of cylinders is being passed on > correctly, but the software only reads the number of heads of > the first partition on the first hd on the controller and assumes all > further partitions to have the same number of heads. Aha, this gives some more details. Perhaps someone of engineering can take this as input to do a more direct search for the cause of all this in the code. -- Best regards, Dr. Peter Kittel // E-Mail to \\ Only my personal opinions... Commodore Frankfurt, Germany \X/ {uunet|pyramid|rutgers}!cbmvax!cbmger!peterk