I have just acquired this board for my A3010 and was hoping to get a
2gb hard drive to partition into 4 512mb partitions.

I have got hold of a Toshiba HDD2718 but can get it partitioned and
formatted with IDEMgr


I have two versions of IDEMgr


I have IDEMgr 1.06 (14-Sep-93) which came with the expansion system and

1.10 (19-Sep-95) which I downloaded from
http://acorn.chriswhy.co.uk/Software/HCCS_idemgr.arc


The 1.06 version says the drive capacity is -2028 MBytes and the moment

you press a button it comes up with the error 'Internal Error: negative

partition size' and the exits.


The 1.10 (19-Sep-95) comes up with the same capacity, but it lets you
try and alter the partitions etc, although when you try and update them

it says 'Allocation Unit is too small'. although it doesnt exit, it
just lets you keep trying.


Both versions can identify the device.


When the machine is starting up it comes up with the error 'Error,
unrecognisable disc format, while scanning partition 0 of device 0',
while the Risc Os Initialising screen is showing.


Any suggestions would be gratefully recieved, and certainly if anyone
has one of the HCCS IDE interfaces and is running a 2gb hard drive off
it I would be grateful to know what hard drive it is.


Thanks in advance.


Mark.

After reading this:-

http://groups.google.com/group/comp...0f22a2178db05db

And this:-

http://groups.google.com/group/comp...dce2f9ab282c48e

I can see that IDEMgr doesnt actually format the drive which I am
guessing is the problem as the drive is formatted in DOS.

So question would be how I format the drive.

I have tried using Simtec IDETool 1.11f but this cannot find the drive.

I am perhaps guessing I need to format the drive using a different
IDEFS interface?

Any ideas would be gratefully appriciated.

Regards

Mark

In article <1160347104.121828.211740@i3g2000cwc.googlegroups.c om>,
MarkYoungIW <MarkYoungIW@Yahoo.com> wrote:

I think that your problems stem from the size of the hard disk. A quick
glance through Acorn Users for 1993 when HCCS were still selling their
expansion system shows that the largest external drives they were selling
for it were 200 MEGA byte at 699pounds (889pounds at the beginning of '93)
in their August '93 advert (which seems to be their last ad in 1993).
Internal drives were 20 MB at £179 and 60MB at £269. It was quite some
time after HCCS were no more that disk drives larger than 512MB became
readily available at an affordable price. So I would guess that the
formatter ws designed to only format drives smaller than this.

Alan

--
--. --. --. --. : : --- --- ----------------------------
|_| |_| | _ | | | | |_ | alan.dawes@argonet.co.uk
| | |\ | | | | |\| | | alan.dawes@riscos.org
| | | \ |_| |_| | | |__ | Using an Acorn RiscPC

Alan P Dawes wrote:

Hi Alan,
Many thanks for your reply. I am guessing you are probably right and
that this is the case. The interface does recognise the hard drive
though, the problem is that HCCS didnt actually make a formatter for
the hard drives. It would seem to me that it would probably work if I
could get the drive formatted and the partition table written. Does
anyone know if Andy Armstrong still reads these groups?

Regards

Mark.

In message <1160479610.197722.317920@i3g2000cwc.googlegroups.c om>
"MarkYoungIW" <MarkYoungIW@Yahoo.com> wrote:


[snip]


I can't remember but if I have time and you still need help with this I can
see if I can dig the old A3000 up and have a look at the HCCS I have in
there.


It could be that it doesn't like the DOS partition table/format. If you can
stick the HD into an x86 machine and run a low level formatter on it or
failing that a DOS boot floppy and use fdisk to delete all partitions on it
(not as good as llf but perhaps enough). Certainly worth trying.

[snip]

Cheers, Mike.....

P.S. May be worth your while to speak to D. Holden of APDL, he's the hard
disc guru.

--
Michael Hambley - mike@armpowered.co.uk
http://www.armpowered.co.uk - My little corner of the web.

Michael Hambley wrote:

Many thanks for that advice. Will see what I can do.

Will let you know.

Mark.

MarkYoungIW <MarkYoungIW@yahoo.com> wrote:

Another option is to use one of the emulators (for Linux, Windows, etc) that
takes a hard disc image to create an image of the appropriate size (500MB?)
and format it within the emulator. Then take the hard disc image file
(assuming the emulator doesn't put a header or something on it) and write it
as a raw image to the disc (with dd in Linux say). That should get around
the formatter getting the size wrong. I think RPCEmu takes a raw disc image
without header.

Theo

Theo Markettos wrote:

Using an emulator is an option, but DO NOT USE RPCemu OR Arculator
for it. They have a bug in their raw disc code that means their disc
images have one byte (word?) on the front that is not needed. Use
Red Squirrel, Virtual Acorn or ArcEm for correct filecore image dumps
(raw data).

Peter