Is it the disk or the HD controller card?

[apsteinmetz]

I confess I've gone from excitement to despair in an A2000 restoration project.  This is my original A2000 with a GVP 030 accelerator/IDE controller.  KS 2.01

When I pulled the machine out of mothballs it would not boot up from HD.  The was no error message, just the "insert disk" splash screen after gronking away for a while.  That makes me think the machine is trying to auto boot from the HD but I would expect some informative error message.  Nope.

I booted from the GVP hard disk installer floppy(s).  Tried the original GVP "ATInstaller" and GVP's later "FaastPrep". Nothing was recognized.  That makes me wonder about the ROMs.  The accelerator card checks out otherwise though, memory, 030 and floating point processor.

So maybe the HD is toast.  It is a Quantum AT40.  Okay, fine.  In a stroke of luck I saw a new old-stock GVP Quantum AT80 drive in EBay.  Sealed in original bag.  Got it and tried to plug it in.  Still nothing. The auto install procedure complained that the gvpat.device could not be found.  There is one auto boot ROM chip on the controller card when the manual suggests two.  I bought and installed the card myself back in the day so it's not like a chip could go missing.  There were so many revisions to these cards.

I don't have any way of getting software like HDToolbox onto an Amiga disk to try that.  I have been blocked by not getting AmigaForever's serial Xfer to work or getting my A1200 restoration with a CF PCMCIA to work. Blocked at every turn but those are subjects for other whiny (or whinging to the Brits) messages.

So now I am stuck.  Is it the card or the disk?  How can I tell? Thanks for any tips!

[Matt_H]

Hmmm. The GVP boot floppies should load the driver from disk (SYS:Expansion), but you might need to disable the autoboot jumper for it to work. i.e., I'm not sure if the (bad?) version in ROM gets replaced by the disk-based version, so try disabling the ROM version entirely.

Also try issuing the command 'version gvpat.device' in a shell. Does it fail or give you a number?

The "good news" is that Ralph Babel, author of the GVP drivers, has made the latest versions of them available on his website. So if the ROMs have somehow gone bad you could burn new ones.