NoIDE release 1.1 (39.17) by Matthew Frost  (20/09/94)
======================================================

A HACK to Disable the IDE device on an OS3.x equipped
Amiga A4000 preventing a 9-25 second boot delay when no
drive is present on the system.


Distibution:
============

This program is Freely Distributable in its original
archive form along with this document.  Permission is
granted for it to be included on any Fred Fish or
Aminet CD compilation and it may be uploaded to any
ftp site or BBS as long as no profit is involved
It may not be distributed by any magazine or for any
commercial gain whatsoever without my prior permission.


Background:
===========

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 which 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??


Requirements:
=============

Amiga A4000 and Kickstart 3.x (previously 3.1)


Installation and Usage:
=======================

1) Copy NoIDE to your C: directory.
2) Insert a line in your startup sequence like so:

Run <>NIL: C:NoIDE

(I put mine straight after C:SetPatch)

3) Reboot the machine and you'll get the delay still, but
the next time you do so it should be MUCH quicker.


History:
========

Release 1.0 - 11/09/94
Version 40.12

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


Release 1.1 - 20/09/94
Version 39.17

Should now works on any Kickstart 3.x - major version falls back
to v39 to reflect this.
Now much more intelligent and finds the IDE driver resident
module instead of the address being hard coded.


Contact me:
===========

Email:   frostmd@aston.ac.uk        (Preferred)
or:      frostmd@uhura.aston.ac.uk  (All valid till
or even: frostmd@BRAVO.aston.ac.uk   at least 06/95)


Disclaimer:
===========

Use this at your own risk!  I have been using this for a
while now and have experienced no side effects but
I can't guarantee it for all systems.  Please let me
know of any problems.