From: /G=Owen/S=Smith/O=SJ-Research/ADMD=INTERSPAN/C=GB/@mhs-relay.ac.uk
Subject: Re: HELP: IDE Harddisk + RISCOS3.1 = error?
Organization: Yale CS Mail/News Gateway
Date: Mon, 9 Nov 1992 22:21:55 GMT

elsas@fwi.uva.nl (Peter Alexander van Elsas (I87)) wrote:

>I just received RISCOS3.1 two days ago. After installing it I started up my
>computer and everything seemed allright. However when clicking on my IDE
>filer icon I got the strange error: Error from IDEFS Filer : Disk not
>Understood - Has it been formatted?

This is your real problem. First of all go back to RISC OS 2 and check that
you can still use your hard disk from RISC OS 2. If you can, then the
formatting software that came with the drive probably created a dodgy format
that RISC OS 2 is oblivious to but RISC OS 3 spots is a bit dubious - we've
seen this here at SJ in a different context. The alternative to a dodgy
format is a dodgy IDEFS, which again RISC OS 2 handled but RISC OS 3 can't.
I'm not aware of an actual specific scenario which can cause this, but a
number of other people are having trouble with hard drives and RISC OS 3 eg.
Pete Goodwin and his Morley SCSI card. So, if your drive is still functional
with RISC OS 2 ring Ian Copestake up and check firmware and formatter
revision numbers with them. If your drive is no longer functional with RISC
OS 2 then make it so - probably by reformatting it :-(.

If you have a friend with an A5000, you might try coupling your hard drive
directly to his machine in place of his IDE disc. If the drive works then
this tells you that the format is OK and it's a firmware/podule problem. If
this doesn't work, then it's probably a problem with the format but not
necessarily, as it's just possible that the sector numbers are offset on the
IDEA card or something like that. If you're prepared to lose the contents of
your disk you could reformat it while attached to the A5000 with !HForm, but
!HForm won't recognise the drive (I don't think) so you may have to wing it
when it comes to some of the numbers (although I think IDEs virtually know
how to format themseleves). If this succeeds you will at least get a format
that RISC OS 3 likes. It's also just possible that the drive won't work at
all with the A5000 IDE code - I know nothing about Western Digital drives.

>I tried to set one IDE drive in
>!Configure but that resulted in another icon and a bad drive error when
>clicking on it.It seems that the two modules IDEFS and IDEFSFiler are
>loaded from my interface but this also results in having two configure
>options for IDEDiscs. Can someone please explain what is happening?

The !Configure option and the corresspnong *Configure IDEDiscs is for
configuring ADFS in the RISC OS 3.10 ROMs to use IDE drives installed in an
A5000. It's also possible for a 16 bit IDE podule to declare it's hardware
to ADFS (replacing the main board IDE controller if present) but this
requires hardware on the podule which is the right flavour for ADFS and it
only works on RISC OS 3. Given that your podule worked on RISC OS 2, it is
not doing this. What your podule is doing instead is providing a new
FileCore based filing system called IDEFS which knows how to access the
podule and a corresponding IDEFSFiler. You should configure RISC OS 3
IDEDiscs to 0, and your card as before.

>I have a
>A410/1 with an IDEA harddisk  interface from Ian Copestake Software and SF &
>PS. The harddisk is a 120mb drive from western digital. Please mail me any
>comment or thoughts, or if you think others will benefit also post!

I posted it - I think it's interesting.

Owen. (owen.smith%gb.interspan.sj-research@mhs-relay.ac.uk)