Expert: Gregory Donner - 12/2/2009

Question
QUESTION: I don't know where to start really theres so many issues. I guess the first thing i need to understand is why when i save high scores on pinball fantasies (installed on hd) they save for awhile and then out of the blue the high scores reset and wont save anymore. Don't suppose you can shed any light on what might be causing this to happen?
I have actually re-formatted the drive to try and fix and it did work for the 1st 2 or 3 saves then once again they reset and wont save anymore, for the life of me i cant work out why this is happening. This may sound a bit trivial but its really frustrating not being able to fix it.

I have another amiga 1200 with a hard drive which, when turned on try its hardest to boot from the hard drive (spin spin quite, spin spin quite) and in the end it gives up and you can only play disks from the floppy. I had a look for it on workbench but theres no sign of it and i tried to install it, nothing will find it. I'm kinda guessing that theres no hope with this 1 but maybe you know better? Anyways if you can help in anyway I'd very grateful indeed !

ANSWER: Hi John,

I wish I could give you an answer as to why Pinball Fantasies is not saving your high scores, but I have no idea what the problem would be. If other data can be read/written from and to the hard drive just fine, than there's obviously no hardware issue involved. I suspect it's a bug of some kind in Pinball Fantasies.

It sounds like the hard drive on your other Amiga 1200 is on its last legs--I would replace it if you can find a hard drive small (and old enough) to work in your 1200. One of the signs of a hard drive going out is making clicking noises--yours may not be doing this, but it's just something else to keep in mind for the future.

I hope this helps!

Greg

---------- FOLLOW-UP ----------

QUESTION: Thanks Greg, you have got me thinking now. The hard drive that is working is making a lot of clicking noises so i might soon end up with 2 A1200's with no hard drive :-( but i do have an old pc with a small hard drive 20 gig from 1998 i think, ive never opened up an amiga so it would be new for me but do you think theres a chance a pc 20 gig drive would work on an amiga?

Answer
Hi John,

The following link from Classic Amiga Wiki is what should do the trick for you in this regard:

http://wiki.classicamiga.com/Installing_a_large_Harddrive_%284GB_or_larger%29

"The Amiga's FFS file system only supports up to 4GB partitions, and a total HD size of 8GB. However that is only due to the built in Workbench File System. If you try to format a larger HD over the 4GB limit you are in danger of losing data and the system will start to wrap the data back onto the start of the HD past the 4GB point.

However there is a solution to this problem. Third party file systems exist for the Amiga that allow you to use much larger HD sizes, and SFS (Smart File System) is the best of these. But an important point to remember is to always create the first boot partition within the first 4GB of the HD space or the Amiga won't be able to find it and boot far enough to load the different file system. A good recommendation is to have a 512MB-2GB boot partition, and then the rest of the HD partitioned into various sized additional partitions based on your needs.

Also if you are wishing to use an HD and IDE CD drive you will also need to buy a buffered IDE interface. You can get one from Amigakit.com for £11 and it works perfectly. This will work perfectly for a setup with a 40GB HDD and laptop CD drive."

I hope this helps!

Greg