NoIDE Release 1.3

                                   Version 39.36

                         © 10th April 1995 Matthew Frost


1. What is NoIDE?

NoIDE is A HACK to disable the ROM based IDE device driver on an OS3.x
equipped Amiga A4000 equipped with no actual IDE hard drive but some
additional drive e.g. a SCSI drive preventing a 9-25 second boot delay while
the system tries to look for a device when no IDE drive is present on the
system.

It should also work on SCSI equipped A1200s too - but I haven't tested this
out.

Why I wrote it.

I used to have a problem on my Amiga 4000/030 that my IDE harddrive was slow
to spin up and used to (occasionally) take longer than the 9 seconds that
Commodore allowed for in the 3.0 ROMs. This meant that I got a boot screen on
every COLD reboot.

Now that I have got an A4091 card and a SCSI-II drive I have removed my old
IDE drive and that gave me a 9 second delay before the system would even touch
the SCSI drive. Not too inconvenient though. However, having upgraded again to
3.1 ROMS I found that Commodore had changed the timeouts to at least 25 if not
30 seconds and this REALLY got on my nerves.  A 25 second wait EVERY time I
rebooted the machine! I thought there must be some way to prevent the IDE
device from being checked.  So I came up with this hack - and it IS a hack -
problem solved for the moment. Why Commodore didn't put a battmem option to
disable the interface on the system is beyond me - Even a jumper on the
motherboard would have been nice.  Anyone know how to do it in hardware by an
adapter on the IDE cable??


2. Requirements

What do you need to use NoIDE?

 * An Amiga 4000/0x0     ;)
   - Don't try using it on anything else, it won't do anything useful except
   - turn off your Commodore SCSI Hard Disk until you cold reboot.
   - (e.g. A3000, A590 & A2091)
 * Kickstart 3.x
 * No IDE drive connected
 * You are booting from some other form of hard disk e.g. SCSI


3. History

Release 1.0 - 11/09/94 v40.12 - 360 bytes

1st public release - works only on Kickstart 3.1 version 40.70


Release 1.1 - 20/09/94 v39.17 - 368 bytes

Should now work on any Kickstart Release 3.x - major version falls back to 39
to reflect this.

Now much more intelligent and finds the IDE driver resident module instead of
the address being hard coded into the program.


Release 1.2 - 01/10/94 v39.32 - 416 bytes

Documentation now in AmigaGuide® format.

Fixed a bug whereby NoIDE didn't co-exist with any other resident modules in
the system.  :-(  (I found out about it when my RADs started disappearing).

Fixed another bug where after a few reboots the module would get corrupted
because some memory wasn't being allocated with the reset module and a memory
list wasn't quite right.  (This was why in previous versions it cleared the
Kick Vectors on every reboot - which was why resident modules like the
ramdrive kept disappearing!).

Now once run, NoIDE stays resident in memory until the Kick Vectors are
cleared or a complete exec-rebuilding-boot happens.

Because of the above, if you use the Early Startup menu now, you are not
subject to the boot delay anymore as you were before. :-)

Now flushes CPU caches to be safe.

Now when run, NoIDE checks to see if there is its resident module already in
the system and if it is, then the program exits straight away without doing
anything.  (It does no harm to have more than one NoIDE resident module in the
system, but it is really a waste of time and memory!)


Release 1.3 - 10/04/95 v39.36 - 388 bytes

Had a big code tidying up session resultin in a smaller and
more efficient piece of code.  (It's amazing what you can find that's bad if
you go back for another look!)



4. Author

NoIDE was written and developed by Matthew Frost

(BSc Computing Science Final Year Student
 Aston University,  Birmingham,  United Kingdom)

 Email:   noideamigafrost.net
 
 WWW: http://www.frost.net/~matthewf/

PERMISSION  UID  GID    PACKED    SIZE  RATIO METHOD CRC     STAMP     NAME
---------- ----------- ------- ------- ------ ---------- ------------ ----------
[generic]                  388     388 100.0% -lh0- 1f79 Mar 31  1995 noide
[generic]                 7184    7184 100.0% -lh0- a8fd Apr 12  1995 noide.doc
[generic]                 8642    8642 100.0% -lh0- 7d1f Apr 12  1995 noide.guide
---------- ----------- ------- ------- ------ ---------- ------------ ----------
 Total         3 files   16214   16214 100.0%            Jul 30 13:51