cannot make ide sd card bootable on Falcon

[RSAHues]

Hi,

I have a Falcon 16Mhz 14Mb with an SD card IDE internal drive. I partitioned the drive into four 1071 MB partitions that are TOS only (not Windows) and compatible with newer TOS versions (4.x), with byte swapping, and it works fine, mapping to drives C, D, E and F.

However, I can't boot from the drive even after installing HDDriver in C (I tried on D, E and F too). When I reopen the partitions dialog, it shows that compatibility is TOS GPT Byte Swapping. I didn't set any ID for the partitions.

Trying to open the Boot Parameters results in the error "Problem when accessing the NVRAM". I suspect my NVRAM is out of battery.

In Devices and Partitions, I see that the drive 2.0 is LUN 0.

Is the NVRAM issue the reason why I can't make disk C bootable?

Thanks in advance

[uweseimet]

You cannot boot from this drive because you enabled byte-swapping when partitioning. This prevents TOS from booting. Let me quote from the HDDRIVER 12 manual, section 1.5:

Finally, "Byte Swapping" creates media with a reverse byte order. This option is only useful when media are partitioned at the Atari's IDE port and are to be used connected to the Atari's IDE port and also with the SCSI bus or by a PC. Access by an Atari to media created in this way carries a speed penalty. TOS cannot boot from these media.

Byte-swapping is only needed when you partition an IDE drive with the Atari and want to use this drive with any other Atari bus or any other platform. With IDE the Atari unfortunately uses a non-standard byte order. Byte-swapping resolves this problem.

Regarding the NVRAM, I agree that there is most likely an issue with the battery. TOS appears to report an error when accessing the NVRAM. But this does not have any impact on booting.

[RSAHues]

I see, thanks for the clarification! I had missed the note about booting with by swapping.