Raven060 (luciodra build).

[agranlund]

I finally have a working byteswap adapter, but I don't understand how to set it up to get Magic to work. I put in an empty CF formatted as FAT and partition it with HDDrivers 12.77. When I restart, everything seems fine, but Magic freezes. How do you do it?

How far do you get booting Magic, and do you get any messages on the screen at all?

If you aren't getting anything at all, perhaps try with minimal auto programs and no rvnova.prg so that you run with just the standard mono.
You'll want magxboot.prg early. I usually make them run in this order: rvbios.prg, xboot.prg, magxboot.prg
Also remember to rename MRAVEN.RAM to MAGIC.RAM, which should be located in the root of C:

You should see HDDriver's boot message quite early in the Magic boot process.

Was HDDriver installed to the boot partition?
(in HDDRUTIL, select C: and then click "File -> Install HDDRIVER..." from the menu)

The boot partition needs to be a TOS partition and a small-ish size. I forget what the actual limit is as I'm used to just making it 255 or 511MB out of habit from old TOS versions.

There is a sample magx.inf in the extras folder that you can copy to the root of your C drive also, but even without it you should be getting _something_ at least. At the very least some kind of error message and not just a blank screen (if that's what is happening?)

[luciodra]

First of all, thank you.
I've made a lot of progress and think I'm close to a solution.
I downloaded the latest version of Magic-Mac and followed almost all of your advice... I copied the entire contents of the EN directory to the root, renamed mraven.ram to magic.ram, and even by changing and disabling the various software in AUTO, I still get the same error.

Code: Select all

Offscreen-driver not found.
Executing MCMD...
System is Halted.

I've searched the various forums and tried various solutions without coming up with anything valid.

[agranlund]

Code: Select all

Offscreen-driver not found.
Executing MCMD...
System is Halted.

You should be getting HDDRIVER startup messages before it tries to load the vdi offscreen driver.
If you are not then I suspect this is why it is failing there to find and load the offscreen driver from the disk.

Screenshot 2026-02-07 at 15.08.01.png (223.84 KiB) Viewed 1769 times

Since you're using the byteswap adapter we can rule out wrong endianess on the interface so my best guesses would be perhaps one of these:
- Disk is not partitioned in a way that MagiC is capable of autobooting (and thus cannot load HDDRIVER from the bootsector)
- HDDRIVER was not installed in the bootsector of drive C

This is how my card is partitioned:

hddriver_part.jpg (86.28 KiB) Viewed 1769 times

And this is how to install HDDRIVER into the C: bootsector so that MagiC is able to use it.

hddriver.jpg (103.35 KiB) Viewed 1769 times

[luciodra]

It seems to me that up to this point I have done everything right... only the first partition is 240 MB, still Tos.
The HDDRIVERS is installed in C.

IMG_2876.jpg (875.08 KiB) Viewed 1758 times

Someone wrote that it could depend on the CF...

[luciodra]

IMG_2877.jpg (814.64 KiB) Viewed 1743 times

This is normal ?

[luciodra]

IMG_2879.jpg (506.72 KiB) Viewed 1740 times

[luciodra]

So, I've made 150,000 attempts to partition my CFs with hddrivers 12.77 but I can't.
Before giving up I would like you to tell me what you do step by step from turning on the Raven with the byteswap adapter mounted and the empty CF formatted Fat16.
1) I have C and M and in C I launch UIP.PRG
2) with Mac I send the hddr1277 archive in M ​​to the Raven IP
3) in M ​​I open hddr1277 and launch HDDRUTIL.APP and proceed to partition
4) I also tried to first launch AUTO HDDRIVER.PRG which proceeds to scan all the partitions.
And here I get into trouble because when I go to write in the partitions I created I get a series of errors, such as recursive directories or corrupt file names etc.

Any suggestions?

[Atarian Computing]

For MagiC, change to WT cache if you have CB on and make sure that "Install HDDRIVER.SYS and Modules in Fast RAM" is not checked in preferences.

[agranlund]

My installation was similar.
(this is from memory, and maybe older version of both EmuTOS and MagiC compared to latest now)

From nothing:
1. copy over hddriver from the network to m:
2. run hddrvutl from m
recent versions has started showing some kind of warning message complaining about EmuTOS.
3. make a tos partition.
make sure compatibility is set to TOS.
No Tos/Win or software byteswap or other fancy options that are meant to make the disk compatible with Windows.
4. it wants to restart so i do that
5. once restarted I once again copy the hddriver package, this time to somewhere on c:
6. launch hddrvutl again, select the C driver and then go to the menu option and pick "Install HDDriver"
This step is crucial. You cannot install the driver manually, parts of it has to be written to the bootsector of the disk.

With this in place, you should have HDDriver installed and automatically used by any TOS that is not EmuTOS.
(or even with EmuTOS if using the ETOS_FIX program that the author of HDDRIVER has made)



Put rvbios.prg in auto folder
Put magxboot in the auto folder
copy+rename mraven.ram -> c:\magic.ram

You can have xboot in the auto folder too of course and before magxboot.prg if you want.
Any other program that you want I would make sure they launch after magxboot.prg -- otherwise you'll just end up running them twice on startup anyway (once in EmuTOS and then once again when you have "resetted" into MagiC)
But for now I would try with minimal amount of stuff in the auto folder.

Actually you could try even with just that.
Or install the rest of MagiC files too.

For where you are failing in the boot process I don't think it matters, at this point we just need to see this printed because if that doesn't happen then nothing else matters:
First "MagiC -BOOTER ...."
And then "HDDRIVER V12.77"

The offscreen driver not found message can be because of different reasons, but if MagiC is not able to use the harddrive then that for sure would be the first cause of that error. If you are getting that sequence of messages but still the same offscreen error message then that's good news and points at the installation but we need to know that for sure first to avoid chasing ghosts from the wrong end of things


There was a screenshot where I think HDDRIVER was printed before MagiC booter. I'm guessing you ran HDDRIVER.PRG from the auto folder before magxboot.prg in that case?
This wouldn't help as anything that happens before magxboot.prg is essentially thrown out. You can kind of think of it as the computer restarting from scratch at that point and into a completely different TOS.

[luciodra]

Thanks for the help, but something just doesn't want to work. For now, I'll let it go.