Riscstation initial setup

hi all, new here and i’m having no end of trouble with a newly aquired Riscstation R7500, the system came without a hard drive and i can’t seem to get riscos 4.03 setup on it, !hform keeps throwing an error 21 whenever i try and format it, is there anywhere i can get the setup discs for this system? i’m rapidly loosing my hair at this rate :)
many thanks

I think that may require the Simtec IDE tools

hform keeps throwing an error 21

If Stuart’s suggestion doesn’t work then how old is the drive you are using and how are you connecting it to the Riscstations interface.

Newer IDE drives are not always compatible with RISC OS and SATA>IDE interfaces can cause issues.

There is a thread on Stardot forum about similar issues and perhaps the drives infterface doesn’t pull some lines high/low.

You could always ask there about the issue as well as for pointers on getting the full RISCStation hard disc image including the formatter.

many thanks stuart, i’ve managed to format the drive and run the RO4 installer, but now the system won’t boot from the drive :( i’ve done configure filesystem,boot, idediscs etc, but it can’t/won’t see the drive, any advice?

I can’t remember whether *Opt 4,2 is (or was in 2000) still needed to set that volume as needing the !Boot entry to be run in addition to Configure Boot. Bet it does. [Edit: Yes, according to the Simtec IDE filing system guide]

It seems i have a strange problem (again), many thanks for the help, i’ve managed to install RO4 onto the hard drive, but it refuses to boot from it, and i have an icon which says IDEFS and another which says :4, is this normal?

What do you see if you type *status filesystem ?

it says, filesystem IDEFS

Have you tried: *IDEFS:DeviceMap and *IDEFS:ListMounts

See the Simtec IDE filing system guide: https://chrisacorns.computinghistory.org.uk/docs/Simtec/Simtec_IDEFilingSystemIssC97.pdf

it says:hard drive on internal interface 0, slot 0
listmount says:harddrive 0 0 drive 5 r/w type is risc os

So is there something else on drive :4 for it to have allocated this one drive :5?

the only drives i have installed is the hard drive and the cdrom drive

Is the hard drive set as IDE Master?

yes, i just checked it, to be sure :) i’ve tried everything on the link you mentioned, but to no avail, maybe the system is buggered, who knows?

Anything useful appear in the menus presented by IDEFSFiler (the IDEFS icon)?

Does the system think there is a hard drive connected to ADFS?

Could you show us the full printout from *Status so I can compare it with mine?

success! many,many thanks to all who gave me help and advice, stuart, doug and andym, many thanks for your time and advice

But what did you do to make it work, in case it helps others?!

it seems the RO4 installer needs a very specific route to take on the Riscstation,i needed to point the installer at first IDEFS, then the name of the hard drive, then $, it then saw the drive and installed correctly,then again, maybe i’m an idiot and didn’t do anything right :)

My guess is it automatically looks for ADFS::4 if nothing else is set up. In your case, there isn’t an ADFS::4 so it didn’t work. Once you’d told it there was an IDEFS::4 instead, that’s when it caught on and set it up properly!

I could be wrong, I have no knowledge of the installer process, but that’s my best guess. Literally a guess!

just a final note on this thread, many thanks to all members who helped me with this, other forums where not so helpful, bordering on gatekeeping, so, thanks again