Boot from external SCSI drive

[AlaskaCC]

I am new to the Atari systems and HDDriver. My Falcon does not have an internal IDE drive, so I am attempting to use an external SCSI drive. How do I make the external SCSI drive auto-boot? I have formatted and partitioned the disk and used the install command via HDUtil. It placed HDDRIVER.sys in the root of the "C" drive. What else do I need to install in order for the Falcon to boot from the SCSI drive? It must be an elementary question but I don't have documentation and cannot find an answer. Thank you.

Clay

[uweseimet]

In general the Falcon can boot from an external SCSI drive and it is sufficient to simply install HDDRIVER with HDDRUTIL. If the boot drive does not have SCSI ID 0 but a different ID HDDRIVER has to be configured accordingly, otherwise only ID 0 will be checked. You can tell HDDRIVER to check for a particular drive ID when booting with the "Devices and Partitions" setting.
Note that the first step during booting, i.e. the bootstrapping of the actual hard disk driver, requires TOS to properly recognize the hard disk drive. TOS can only boot from drives that do not require the computer to have a SCSI ID of its own (so-called initiator identification, you can find more details when searching the HDDRIVER forum). Some drives require initiator identification (HDDRIVER offers this feature and additionally offers bus arbitration), but TOS does not support initiator identification and this is why some SCSI drives cannot be booted from.

By the way, there is no need to place HDDRIVER.SYS anywhere manually. HDDRUTIL will automatically save HDDRIVER.SYS to the boot partition when installing HDDRIVER.

[AlaskaCC]

Thanks for the information Uwe. Since that didn't work I though I would try an IDE solution. I have a 170MB Western Digital 2.5" notebook drive. I attached it and attempted to format it but I get an error. The program says that the format is in progress but hangs at that screen for about a minute. Then it says:

"Couldn't write boot sector"

I tried it as a master, slave and no jumper at all but it still will not work. The drive spins up during the Falcon boot-up process. No other hard drives attached. Any ideas on how to correct this or what to change?

Thank you.

Clay

[uweseimet]

This might be a problem with your IDE cable, which in particular should not be too long.

Note that very old IDE drives can be damaged by formatting them, and because all drives are factory-formatted anyway it is sufficient to simply partition a drive without formatting it. In general a hard drive only needs to be formatted if there are bad sectors on it. Even if a drive was previously used with a different platform/operating system, partitioning is always sufficient to make it usable for the Atari.
So just try to partition the drive and skip formatting, but check your cable first.