A2000 Boot-up issues

[pneron]

My A2000 occasionally needs a 1-2 soft-boots after a hard-boot. I have an external SCSI tower where all my drives reside. At first,  I thought my PicassoII card was the issue but fixed that known blown resistor near one of the Sub HD 15 jacks. However, sometimes, after a hard-boot, I still need to do a few soft-boot. I always boot the tower first, wait a few seconds than boot my machine.

Question # 1: Could the Relay switch on my Picasso II card be creating intermittent boot-up issues? A visual inspection shows some historical heating issues from the blown resistor near one of the Sub HD 15 jacks.


Question # 2: Or could the SCSI drives be the issue? They are new drives and the SCSI cable is of the right length and also new.

[10MARC]

I always give my scsi drives about 10 seconds to spin up before powering on my Amiga. My scsi card also has a delay option to delay boot for a while to allow them to spin up. Have you looked for a jumper to do that?

[pneron]

The jumper settings SCSCI IDs should be ok, unless you are referencing to something else?
The SCSI chain (which only includes the tower) has a termination on the tower side as well

Thanks

[rkidd7952]

Hi,

I'd be surprised if the relays on the Picasso would interfere with booting.  Those just switch the video output between the Picasso board and the native Amiga video (via the input VGA connector).  Does the system boot normally without the Picasso card?

You could also add some echo statements to your startup sequence to open a shell window using the Amiga video early in the boot sequence.  The relays won't come into play until the system tries to switch to a Picasso mode, so this could let you judge whether the issue happens before that point.

Robert

[pneron]

I will have to pull the card out and check that...dumb question but how can I see the screen if I don't have the card?

[rkidd7952]

Ah, assuming you don't have a monitor handy that can connect to the video port on the motherboard, you can connect the mono video port (third RCA, next to the audio jacks) to a TV with a composite input.  It won't be the best picture, but it'll be OK for troubleshooting. 

Robert

[pneron]

ahhh, yes that make's sense, I can use that as pre-boot viewer for troubleshooting , good idea, let me  see if I can get something hooked up this weekend...appreciate the emails responses

[pneron]

OK Rob, I was able to run a Video composite signal to my TV and saw the WB come-up and realized the error that I had made in startup sequence. I fixed that and the machine ran fine for a few sessions. However, at one point it crashed again and I was unable to recover from any hard of soft boots. However, this time I noticed 2 things: The Video screen had a live feed signal (blank screen) and I did not hear my Picasso card "click" over this time. I wonder if I may have bad relay switch, bad capacitors or perhaps a problem with the card? I tried to reset the card a few times but nothing.
I will try tomorrow morning to see if it works.

[rkidd7952]

Hi,

A word on what to expect from adding an echo statement: the echo may prevent the system from switching into a Picasso screen mode, but you should see a message indicating what's happening.  On my system, the early echo causes a shell window to open to display the output.  The system boots normally until it attempts to switch to a Picasso screen mode.  At that point, a requester pops up indicating Intuition can't change the screen mode because a window is open (the shell window).  When I dismiss the requester, the system finishes booting to Workbench using a native Amiga screen mode.

What happens when the system fails to boot?  Does it hang indefinitely, do you get a software failure message, etc?

Did you have a monitor connected to the Picasso output when you saw a blank screen on the mono output?  It looks like the relays only switch the color signals.  The sync signals are switched by the nearby logic chip.  If the system is booting far enough to open a Picasso screen, I think you'll get a stable blank screen on the monitor even if the relays have failed.

Robert

[pneron]

Thanks Rob.

I have monitor hooked up on the Amiga video bus side via 'RCA' jack. I was able to see the WB screen a few times during boot-up and was able to get back to Picasso on my WB screen...then the system died after a crash. Now I see the monitor flicker a few times during cold boot (Amiga side), but stays blank. I don't hear the Picasso Relay switch over anymore as well.  I was going to pull out the card, clean it, maybe even change the Relay since I don't hear it clicking over anymore.

What a headache, just when I thought it was working

This is my old DAW (my main DAW is on my Mac)

OK, just a new update:

I pulled out my Inet225 card after cleaning and reseating every card and the system booted fine....I am still not convince its the Inet225 card but I will leave that out for now to see if this makes a difference. I am going to boot the system to see if it stays stable for a while.

BTW: I have been getting this message dont know how to fix it...I think a while back I must of installed the wrong version of Picasso. This message appears when my system gets to the WB

"Error opening PicassoIV.resource"


Another update this morning:
The machine booted up fine and I heard the PicassoII Relay switch over. Not sure what's going  on but I still think's its a Relay issue on my Picasso Card

[zipper]

Probably a PicassoIV driver in devs/Monitors - has there been a PicassoIV in use earlier?

[pneron]

No...I accidentally installed that driver one time but did reinstall Picasso II

In my Devs/Monitors> I have PicassoII   and PicassoII.info

[zipper]

Perhaps
- launch Snoopdos and run your startup-sequence to see what happens
- or boot without startup-sequence then <set interactive on> and you can boot line by line via pressing <return> and see which line is triggering the popup.  Something in Env:  ?

[pneron]

Thanks for this tip

[pneron]

BTW: Got some feedback for a tech center...they suggested
"recommend getting an ATX adapter from Amigakit and a PSU that will fit."
I will try this and let you know how I make out.

As per Zipper's suggestion, I will also check the Picasso setting as well later this week

Thanks everyone