Stuck on a HD issue... any ideas would be helpful

[Matt_H]

Yikes, this is a tough one. I don’t have a definitive answer, just some more questions or lines in inquiry to investigate. It sounds so much like a termination problem but you say you’ve accounted for that...

SCSI2SD configured correctly via attaching to PC USB?

Is the machine otherwise working? No latent battery damage? Power supply confirmed okay? Was the machine working before upgrading to 3.2? Tried a different SCSI ribbon cable?

How is your RAM configured, e.g., on which boards does your RAM live? 512K of Chip seems low - don’t most 2000s have 1MB onboard? Or do you have one of the old German motherboards? I’m guessing some RAM is on the 2091 so it’s probably worth running the 2091 RAM Test to make sure the chips are good.

Mask and MaxTransfer settings might also be worth looking at, but 3.2 supposedly doesn’t need those anymore...

Correct FFS version or other filesystem in the hard drive’s RDB?

I don’t have any direct experience with it, but a full system diagnostic with DiagROM could be worth trying. I wonder if it can be softkicked for easier use...

[Matt_H]

[...] the drive I was copying to is now left with 0% free space, which means the bad file copied was bloated which is why the HD light remains flickering.

No, in all likelyhood that's not the explanation. I assume you are using FFS as filesystem, not SFS/PFS or anything like that? In that case, you are probably seeing FFS' built-in diskvalidator trying to validate the volume after detecting some error in the disk data structures on bootup. What it does is it disables writing on the volume during the validation and sets the available space to 0.

Just wait and let it finish, which may take a long time (even hours, don't remember exactly). Then it will show the real free space and allow writing again - unless it fails to validate for some reason. In that case your only option will be to backup the data, reformat and copy back.

Best regards,

Niels

Good points, but while this is the normal way to handle validation issues there’s some sort of underlying problem going on in Malakie’s system that’s causing the disk errors and loss of validation in the first place.

[Matt_H]

Did you use 3.2’s HDToolbox to prep the drive? Not just to partition it, but to install the RDB from scratch? The other HDToolbox suggestion I have is to make sure the Direct SCSI option is enabled.

Do you have another SCSI ribbon cable you can try? An invisible defect in the cable seems like a real possibility if the problems are less frequent when one of the drives is external.

Have you configured SCSI2SD at all? There are a number of options that might be worth looking at.

[Matt_H]

Echoing Pat. Wow, good diagnostic work. Hopefully it's just a wonky burn of the ROMs. One other (very unlikely) possibility, there have been a few hacks for the 2091 in recent years, some of which also require a modified set of ROMs - did you accidentally end up with modified v7 ROMs that don't match your unmodified 2091? @SpeedGeek is our resident 2091 expert and can probably help figure that out. I'll bet those v8 ROMs you mentioned would also be of interest.

There have indeed been a ton of developments in Amigaland in recent years, particularly in the last 5 or so as FPGA technology has taken off. I've been engaged all this time and I still can't keep track of it all!