I’ve been trying to install MagiC on my Atari along with a standard TOS. The idea was to be able to boot MagiC by swapping drives at boot time in order to properly separate MagiC from the standard TOS boot drive.
From what I understand, there’s a possibility to boot from a different drive by pressing the drives letter right after the memory test, but it doesn’t actually swap the drive letters: for example, if I press “M” to boot from drive “M”, it actually bypasses the AUTO from drives C: etc… but it’s still drive “M”.
With a different driver, I have the option to actually swap the drives : if I press “M” during boot, the M drive becomes drive C and drive C becomes M. is there a way to do that with HDDriver, did I miss something ?
I tried installing MagiC on a different drive and booting from this different drive, but it seems Magic really doesn’t like that, so I really need drive swapping.
Is there any option to do this with HD Driver ?
Drive swapping
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uweseimet
- Site Admin
- Posts: 408
- Joined: 10 Jan 2010, 15:39
Re: Drive swapping
No, there is no way to swap drives, and I also do not plan to support this. There is software that remembers paths, e.g. for configuration files or fonts, and when drive IDs change, you can easily run into troubles.
I also don't think that such a feature is consistent with the way AHDI/TOS handles drive IDs. Look at what AHDI (and all AHDI compatible drivers) do with removable media: They reserve a fixed number of partitions for each removable media drive. If you insert a medium with more or less partitions, the number of reserved IDs does not change. This means that if the new medium has more partitions, some partitions will not be visible. If it has less partitions, some IDs remain unused. AHDI tends to keep the drive IDs stable and prodictable.
The official AHDI release notes and the HDDRIVER manual provide the details.
Regarding your MagiC, I would have expected that you can boot it from any drive, and I guess that this is just a MagiC setup issue on your side. As far as I can tell MagiC is now maintained by Thorsten Otto, maybe he can help you with this.
I also don't think that such a feature is consistent with the way AHDI/TOS handles drive IDs. Look at what AHDI (and all AHDI compatible drivers) do with removable media: They reserve a fixed number of partitions for each removable media drive. If you insert a medium with more or less partitions, the number of reserved IDs does not change. This means that if the new medium has more partitions, some partitions will not be visible. If it has less partitions, some IDs remain unused. AHDI tends to keep the drive IDs stable and prodictable.
The official AHDI release notes and the HDDRIVER manual provide the details.
Regarding your MagiC, I would have expected that you can boot it from any drive, and I guess that this is just a MagiC setup issue on your side. As far as I can tell MagiC is now maintained by Thorsten Otto, maybe he can help you with this.