Odd A1222+ Issue

Picked up an A1222+ motherboard and built up my system today. Got it all ready, put in a hard drive, and booted off the USB key as stated in the manual.

It booted fine, went through the Media Toolbox, partitioned the drive, added the filesystem to it, etc. It asks for a reboot to take effect, sure, reboot off the USB key again as it states in the manual..

On the way up it starts tell me that the hard drive is not a DOS disk.. well sure.. of course it isn't, I haven't had a chance to format it yet.

The problem is, it dies at this part - I get an endless stream of requestors looking for SYS: LIB: etc... since I booted off the USB key, this shouldn't happen - it should know to look for its files there.

I took the hard drive out, put it in my x5000 and formatted it, but I still get stuck in the same spot.

I'm a bit lost. It seems like a catch 22 - I can't format it until I boot up and I can't boot up because I can't format it.

Did I miss a step somewhere?

@icbrkr

Have you tried playing with the boot priority of both usb stick and hd. Go to media toolbox and give the usb stick partition a higher boot priority than the hd.

@icbrkr
USB boot disk shoulh have higher boot priority OOTB.

It looks more like your bootable USB drive is corrupted. Could you have accidentally overwritten it?

If you remove all drives from the A1222, does it still boot from the USB drive correctly?

I don't believe I overwrote it - I booted off of it fully all of once, and just enough to launch the Media Toolbox.

I believe I can boot fine off of it without a drive in place, I'll double check this morning.

The boot priority seems plausible, I'll check it this morning. The manual states I should put it at '0' for the hard drive.

The USB drive boots fine and has a boot priority of '1' which means it should be first in line. I went through the startup-sequence and there is nothing exciting in it at all. I don't see any reason why it would even bother trying to look at DH0.

One thing I notice that's different is that during the boot process, without a drive, I get a traditional WB/Kickstart screen for a minute and with it, it dies before it shows it.

I'm thinking that the system doesn't know how to use the filesystem on its way up - it's telling me to partition as NGFS/01. My x5000 hangs when it sees the disk formatted this way when booting.

If I boot with it say formatted with FAT or whatever, it boots with it in the drive without a problem and mounts it.

Okay.. got it fixed.

Erased the partition on the drive on my Mac. Booted off of my USB key. Opened up the Media Toolkit, reloaded the RDB and saved it to the drive again. Created a partition, made it non-bootable, and non-mountable.

Booted successfully off my USB key, mounted the drive manually, formatted it, and installed the OS.

Before the last reboot, made it mountable and bootable.

@icbrkr

That was a ridiculous amount of work. Of course this stems from the system being too old. It of course doesn't need to reboot since it's only a format away. But because they are still using the same method as an A500 from 35 years ago it wants to reboot. On top of making it so hard to even manage partitions and sizes you want. By now this should be automated in a more simpler way. It's still too technical.

The USB should be set to priority 5 or 10 to match a floppy I'd say. 1 seems a bit low. The problem is that can be overridden. The Kickstart can or NVRAM variable can change the boot drive. And it can be changed in the early startup menu. So rather than fiddle with boot priorities bring up the menu to check can be easiest. And then to specify what to boot off and also check what it's trying to boot off.

Looks like the installer key needs some more beta testing as the key gets stuck trying to unlock.