Zip250 drive in A1: can't use an RDB on it?

I recently acquired a used IDE Zip250 drive and some disks and set it up in my A1. While I can use it with a mountlist no problem with both FFS and SFS, I do not get any mounted partitions from the disk if I set it up with an RDB in Media Toolbox. Is this by design, since it shows up as a removable disk in Media Toolbox? Is there any way to bypass this and have OS4.1 mount the partition(s) on the Zip disk anyway from the RDB?

Reason why: I want to make a recovery disk using one of the Zip disks that is bootable.

I was able to do this no problem with a SCSI Zip100 under OS3.9. Seems odd that I can't do this under OS4.1.

@dwolfman

I have several Zip drives and I can understand why you would want to do this... but really, why don't you just burn a cdrom/dvdrom which is bootable?

If you don't have a dvdrw then there are more serious issues here than you trying to make a bootable zip

You could argue that you wish to update your emergency disk but honestly, an emergency disk just needs to start the system so you can copy anything significant across from larger media... if by chance eventually it does become too old, burn another!

anyway, someone might actually be able to answer your question, sorry I wasn't able to help answer your actual question

@Slayer

Yeah, I know I can burn a CD/DVD. Even have AmiDVD set up, but haven't quite figured out how to use it yet.

Personally, I'd rather have a Zip disk I can boot. It also makes for easier updating of content (just copy it!), versus the CD/DVD (re-burn it for one little file?). I have a tendency to tweak a disk until I like how it works, then come back and tweak it some more. Having to re-burn the CD/DVD every time would be extremely time consuming.

I suppose I could make a bootable floppy that has the mountlist in it, which mounts the Zip, then hands everything over to it for the rest of the booting. Seems cumbersome to have to do it that way, though.

@dwolfman

Can you select the zip drive as a boot source in UBoot, or does it not show up?

@dwolfman

OS4 enforces the rule which should have been enforced all along: A removable volume does not have an RGB (the acronym does stand for Rigid Disk Block). And vice versa, a volume with an RGB is not a removable volume.

At least this is how I understood the word of the elders back when it was last discussed.

Also remember that the RDB among other things is expected to carry information such as Last Disk and Last Unit. That also goes against the idea of it being there one moment and gone the next.

Best regards,

Niels

@nbache

I figured as much.

Too bad ABackup isn't open source yet. That's the one backup program on my old A3000 setup that I really liked. It was another reason for using the Zips, but it REQUIRES the removable media to have RDBs on them if they are bigger than a floppy.

I also cannot seem to get LHA's multi-volume stuff to work with the Zip correctly. It writes one byte to the lha file on the first disk, then asks for the next disk. When that is inserted, it still says to insert the next volume for the set.

Good thing the drive was free and the 9 disks I bought only cost me $0.48 each at the local thrift store. Even better was that 6 of the 9 were still new, in their original plastic shrink wrap.

Oh, for the earlier post: I haven't checked to see if it shows as a boot source in U-Boot (didn't have it marked as bootable), but I was able to get U-Boot to read the RDB from it using the "ide part" command. Showed the correct info, too. I suspect that U-Boot will probably boot from it just fine, but SLB may not, or the OS4 kernel may ignore it after it's taken over.