Amiga A2000 + GVP SCSI HD Controller

[BoingBoss]

Hi AdMartin,

By no means should you get a Commodore controller. It will most likely be necessary to upgrade the ROMs and/or the WD chip on it for it to work properly.

This is simply NOT TRUE!  About 99% of all of the A2091 boards that I have tested work really well and I have never had any problems with them.  In fact, they are such good SCSI boards that many Amiga 4000 owners use them.  The Commodore A2091 SCSI Controller board IS one of the best and was specifically designed for the Amiga 2000 and 3000 computers (the Amiga 3000 has the A2091 circuitry on its motherboard).  I myself have had more problems with the GVP boards then with the Commodore boards.  I have tried other SCSI controller boards, but I find myself always going back to the good old reliable A2091 card.  IT WORKS AND IT WORKS REALLY WELL !!!! :-D

[shaf]

I partially agree with Boingboss,

Having installed may SCSI controlers by many manufacturers generally on an A2000 the A2091 was the besat bet. Some GVP SCSI controllers were problematic depending on the Kickstart and Controller ROM Revisions.

On the A4000 the A2091 is the chaepest solution, it works but is slow. The card performs much better with a GuruROM.

I finally got a Warpengine 4040 for my A400 and am much happier with performance.

Cheers
Shaf
 

[jeffimix]

@BoingBoss

It might have some difficulty in a speed test against a fully loaded DKB128.

[Azryl]

geez... can we get back on topic here and HELP this guy with his problem with his CURRENT hardware

not confuse the issue with opinions and preferences for diff hardware


the guy HAS an A2000 and a GVP scsi board

lets be good Amigans and get his computer running properly before polluting the topic?

opinions and ego have there own discussion somewhere in this forum, go there


Azryl

[Ilwrath]

@BoingBoss et al-
Pretty much ANY old Zorro2 style SCSI card will give problems on more modern drives.  Both the A2091 and GVP have various upgrades that are required to get them up to speed.  I'm not sure one is more evil than the other.  (Oh, and BoingBoss - No one would use a A2091 on an A4000, if avoidable.  Way too slow, hogs bus resources like a fiend, etc.  A4k owners would use a SCSI card on run off the processor card expansion.)  

Anyhow, to the issue at hand - A GVP HD card in an A2000 with kickstart 1.3.  My first question is have you researched the EPROM version of your GVP controller, and made sure it supports the 1.3 ROM?   Most GVP cards have replacement ROMS in them, and some may not support autobooting under 1.3.  The solution may be as simple as going with 2.0 or higher for your A2000.  

[AdMartin]

BoingBoss wrote:
Hi AdMartin,

By no means should you get a Commodore controller. It will most likely be necessary to upgrade the ROMs and/or the WD chip on it for it to work properly.

This is simply NOT TRUE!  About 99% of all of the A2091 boards that I have tested work really well and I have never had any problems with them.  In fact, they are such good SCSI boards that many Amiga 4000 owners use them.  The Commodore A2091 SCSI Controller board IS one of the best and was specifically designed for the Amiga 2000 and 3000 computers (the Amiga 3000 has the A2091 circuitry on its motherboard).  I myself have had more problems with the GVP boards then with the Commodore boards.  I have tried other SCSI controller boards, but I find myself always going back to the good old reliable A2091 card.  IT WORKS AND IT WORKS REALLY WELL !!!! :-D

Alright, alright! :-) My GVP has always worked well and with SFS it supports larger drives without any ROM upgrade. I got a used A2091 once, together with an Amiga package that I bought, but I immediately sold it on. It would have needed a ROM upgrade to be able to run OS 3.1.

A A2091 with the latest ROM and WD chips wouldn't be bad I guess, but I still think a GVP card would be better, as it supports up to 8MB in SIMMs. 1MB 30-pin SIMMs can be had practically free from eBay and 8MB continuous fastmem is better than having the memory split into several smaller chunks. Additionally, I imagine the GVP has it's memory controller timed for 70 or 80ns RAM, whereas the A2091 is timed for 120ns RAM and that's a considerable speed difference.

/Martin

[EdKing]

I would check to make sure the jumpers are correct for the amount of ram you have installed on the GVP card. The only time I ever had trouble with a GVP board crashing the system was when the jumpers were set incorrectly.

Ed King

[Azryl]

might be redundant thinking, but you might also like to try the GVP card in another zorro slot, maybe move it closer towards the Power Supply. Or, try running the scsi harddrive not with the gvp onboard power connector but from a spare power connect from the PSU.

This is to check to see if adequate power is being supplied to the scsi drive thru the card etc

good luck

[AF-Domains.net]

I have tried the card in all zorro slots before changing ID number but it still kept on giving me the software failure requester just after the first floppy drive click.

Later on today I am going to try changing ID to 7 on the board to see if that works.

Thanks

AF-Domains.net

[AF-Domains.net]

Tried to get the GVP SCSI card to work but kept on giving me software failure requesters.

even tried the card without the ram (the jumpers were set correctly) and with different hard drives with ID 0 but made no difference.

I am going to try and get hold of another A2000 (not B2000) compatible SCSI card to see if that works.

Thanks for all the advice.

AF-Domains.net

[thebajaguy]

I know the topic is old, but the people that responded back in the day never understood how boot blocks on hard disks came to be back in the early OS 1.2/1.3 days.  They were giving advice on things they didn't understand. 

FWIW, GVP had the first RDBs (with a floppy boot disk, loading the SCSIDEV driver with Binddrivers) before OS 1.3 came out and fixed the expansion.library boot ROM bug in OS 1.2.  The GVP 1.0 ROMs just had to be fitted to the cards when OS 1.3 came out - no reformat.  C= was still on the A2090 at this point, and the 2090a came out shortly after OS 1.3 did - but neither card was pretty to partition.  C= then effectively borrowed and modified what GVP basically had done with the RDB when they produced the A2091, and standardized disk boot blocks for all developers making disk controllers.  This is why GVP, C=, Supra, Microbotics, and most other SCSI controllers can have disks prepped on them moved between controller makers, and generally work.

This issue for the user was likely caused by the original 1.0/2.x ROM set on an original GVP Impact SCSI HC or SCSI+RAM controller, and a corrupted RDB on the disk.  I used to fix this back in the day on the phone at GVP Tech Support.  There is a way to do it with the original floppy disk, and it's CLI-based prep tools, but using the newer v3 FastPrep floppy's tools and driver is easier.

The solution is to obtain the newer GVP boot floppy with the v3.x gvpscsi driver in the Expansion folder.  Disable the ROMs on the SCSI card, boot from the FastPrep floppy, binddrivers will get called by default, load the v3.x gvpscsi.device driver from Expansion.  Use FastPrep/ExpertPrep to Erase the RDB, and program in a new set of partitions, format them, then copy a Workbench 1.3 and Extras disk to the first partition.  Re-enable the ROM with the jumper, and reboot.   

It would have been a good time to also obtain the newer v3.15 ROM (not a 4.x), as it will run faster than with the pre v3.x scsidev.device driver.  The RDB that FastPrep writes should still boot under the old GVP ROM set in the meantime.