AmigaOS 3.2 problems

[PunkTiger]

Seems to be a bit of a ghost town here, but I'll give it a whirl...

I had recently upgraded my A1200 to use AmigaOS 3.2 (ROMs and software). The update wasn't without its issues, as the software came on a CD, and my A1200 doesn't have a CD reader, and I haven't put a Gotek on it yet. I got the ROMs in the right sockets on the 2nd try, the ADFs of the software unpacked to discs, and I went for the installation. It went smoothly until I got to the Storage disc which cropped up with a error, and caused the whole installation to halt. I managed to get the Storage disc repaired, and started the installation again. This time it went through seemingly without a hitch. But, that's when the trouble started.

Long story made not as long, my A1200 now refuses to see the PCMCIA card slot (PrepCard says there's no slot). That was the only way I could get outside programs on my Amiga, and vice versa. Checking with the drivers and Storage, CF0 is up and mounted, but it's not reporting when a card is inserted.

Also, I have a boot conflict. It seems that I now have a DH0 and a DH1, and a DH0.1 and a DH1.1. I need to go to the boot menu when the computer starts (hold down mouse buttons), and disable either the ".1" drives, or the regular drives. Both sets of drives point to the exact same place, respectively.

So, you can see my quandary. Short of nuking everything on the drive and starting from scratch, are there any pointers someone can give me to permanently disable/remove the ".1" drives, and/or what I should look for to have my PCMCIA card slot active again?

Any help will be greatly appreciated!

[Matt_H]

Are you 100% certain you have the correct ROMs? Core functionality of the PCMCIA slot comes from a module in the Kickstart - A1200 and A600 ROMs have it, the others don't. If you accidentally bought/burned/received 3000/4000(T) ROMs, that might explain why the PCMCIA slot isn't working anymore. Another possibility is that you've got a combination of ROM- and disk-based modules that are conflicting - did you write the correct (i.e., A1200) modules ADF to disk?

The system will append .1 to device names if there are identically-named devices connected to the system. Does everything look normal in HDToolBox? (i.e., you didn't accidentally duplicate your partitions.) This could be another Kickstart module issue, like the system somehow ended up loading 2 copies of scsi.device. Confirm with SysInfo, Scout or a similar utility - you'll see scsi.device and 2nd.scsi.device if this is what's happened. You can also confirm with HDToolBox - set the tooltype to use 2nd.scsi.device instead of scsi.device. If it works and you see your drive/partitions, then you've got a duplicate.

The next diagnostic step for the duplicate devices is to go to the Early Startup Control menu from a cold boot. If the duplicates are showing up then, then it's a module issue in the ROMs. If they're only showing up in Early Startup after a warm boot, then it's a module issue on disk.

Bottom line, something seems off with your Kickstart. You may want to revert to Kickstart 3.1 and go for a fully disk-based installation of 3.2. That will eliminate the physical 3.2 ROMs as a possible problem at the expense of some RAM and a slower initial boot. You shouldn't need to nuke the drive, but may need to run the installation again to ensure all the correct disk-based Kickstart modules get onto your hard drive.

[PunkTiger]

Thank you most kindly for the reply. There's a lot to take in.

The disc and romset I got off eBay from Sordan in Ireland (doing a search for AmigaOS 3.2 will bring up their listings). They're supposed to be the roms for the A1200. I have no way of testing whether or not they're the CORRECT roms, so I can only take their word for it.

As for the installation media, I wrote to disc only those files that were in the A1200 folder. I'll reinstall my 3.1 roms and see if the slot comes back to life.

As for the hard drive, I have only one hard drive in my system that's split into two partitions (Workbench and Work). From a cold boot, the duplicates show up immediately. I might have goofed up in HDToolBox? It was showing that I had two devices (0 and 1) on the drive and one of them had "changed" and I should save the changes. I did, but I have a weird feeling I shouldn't have done that.

As I mentioned above, I'll try reinstalling my 3.1 roms, see what that does, then report back.

I've only been using an Amiga off and on since 1988. You'd think I'd know what I was doing by now.

[PunkTiger]

All right. I've turned back the clock, reinstalled my AmigaOS 3.1 software and roms and... everything works again! I have my card reader back, and the duplicate drives are no longer there. Holy fraggaroli, I thought I gummed up my A1200 but good!

Looking closely at the 3.2 roms, they say they're for the A1200, but I presume they really aren't? As I said, I have no way to really test them, so I had to rely on the label. That said, I'm going to take a LONG HARD THINK before I do another upgrade like that again. I'll happily keep 3.1 on here, and leave it to whoever cleans out my estate when I'm dead to upgrade it. Amiga upgrades and me have a long history of going horribly, horribly wrong.

Again, thank you so very much for your advice, time, and patience with me.

[Matt_H]

Glad you're at least back to a working state! The hard drive duplication, e.g., showing up as both unit 0 and unit 1 is particularly odd. What other hardware do you have in the machine?

It's convoluted, but the way to check whether your 3.2 ROMs are mislabeled is:
-Put them back in the machine
-Grab an image of the Kickstart with something like this
-Get an MD5Sum (or your other favorite hash method) of the resulting file
-Compare against the MD5Sum of the ROM files on the 3.2 CD. You may also want to check against the ROM files in the 3.2.1 and 3.2.2 updates

My suspicion is that the hash will match something other than the 1200 ROM image, in which case Sordan will hopefully sort things out for you!

[Thomas]

You could install OS 3.2 with the 3.1 ROMs in place.

Firstly you would have 3.2 up and running even if you need to wait for the replacement ROMs

And secondly (worst case), if the same issues appear with a soft-loaded 3.2, you would know that there is an issue with 3.2 on your machine and the ROMs you got are ok.

[kolla]

Sounds like the A1200 has a ram expansion card with more than 4MB RAM?

[Thomas]

Then it wouldn't work with 3.1, too.

Only with 3.0 and 3.1.4 the PCMCIA port is available errorneously with 8 MB RAM. In 3.1 and 3.2 it is handled correctly.

[PunkTiger]

OK... I'm dingbatting 1000 with my A1200. I have a tale to tell. Are you sitting comfortably?

Matt_H: The only things in my A1200 are the Seagate 9144A 60-meg hard drive, and a DKB 1202 RAM expansion with 8 megs RAM, 68881 co-processor and battery-backed clock. Apparently, it won't interfere with the PC slot, according to the link I just supplied.

I got the program you suggested (GrabKickDisk), and during the unarchiving to my Work partition, it encountered a disc error. I acknowledged the error and the computer immediately gurued. I was then thrown into a loop of reboot - Workbench appears - guru - reboot - Workbench appears - guru - wash - rinse - repeat.

Long story made not as long, I managed to get it to boot from floppy, miraculously found an old utility disc that had DiskSalv on it, and let it loose on the hard drive. I got it to the point where the HD will cold boot into Workbench, and maybe will allow me to reboot once, but any reboot after that will do the above loop thing again. During a lucid point, I got the entire HD copied onto a CF card, so at least I have that.

That gave me an idea. I have some CF to laptop IDE converters and a few "professional/industrial" 4 GB CF cards. A match made in heaven! But as it turns out, not quite. The CF converters doesn't seem to want to fully work in the 1200. The drive light is on continuously. I can install the drive, boot from floppy into WB and use the Install disc and HDToolKit to read the card, format it properly, partition it (making sure to save changes to disc), then install 3.1. After a successful installation, I reboot... and the drive doesn't show up. I boot from floppy, get into HDToolKit, have it read the SCSI bus, and at that point, the drives show up on Workbench. Well, that's A) annoying, and B) not going to work.

So NOW I'm faced with the decision of whether or not I format the original hard drive, remap the bad blocks, install 3.1 on it and then migrate the rest of the HD from the CF card just so I can HOPEFULLY get a stable system again. Then decide whether or not I give enough of a leaping yahoo to "upgrade" to 3.2 after all this rigamarole.

Y'know, all this puts up a convincing argument to just leave well enough alone.

EDIT: I might as well ask here. How can I modify a COPY of my WB3.1 floppy to allow me to use the PCMCIA slot? The thought crossed my mind, but I forgot the reason why.

[kolla]

Then it wouldn't work with 3.1, too.

Only with 3.0 and 3.1.4 the PCMCIA port is available errorneously with 8 MB RAM. In 3.1 and 3.2 it is handled correctly.

As far as I know, there isn’t any correct way to have 8MB of fast ram work together with pcmcia on stock a600 and a1200, as both 68000 and 68EC020 only had 24bit address space (16MB, but Amiga only use positive signed address space, so 8MB).

So I’m not sure what exactly has “worked” or how?

[kolla]

@PunkTiger

Are you by any chance using 3.0 (39.106) kickstart chips with OS 3.1?

Could you try 3.2 (or 3.2.2) kickstart with one of the 4MB simm modules removed, for “science”?

[PunkTiger]

@PunkTiger

Are you by any chance using 3.0 (39.106) kickstart chips with OS 3.1?

Could you try 3.2 (or 3.2.2) kickstart with one of the 4MB simm modules removed, for “science”?

"Yes" for the first question.

"I can give it a proverbial whirl" for the second question.

I presume I'm researching as to whether or not the PC slot works if I don't have the full 8mb on the ram expansion... for science.

Mind you, I'm not able to do a full install of 3.2 while my ancient HD is slowly disintegrating; unless I take that last step and reformat it.

I'll see what I can do. Stay tuned...

[PunkTiger]

@PunkTiger

Could you try 3.2 (or 3.2.2) kickstart with one of the 4MB simm modules removed, for “science”?

Now, when you say 3.2 Kickstart, are you asking me to re-install the 3.2 Kickstart roms I have? The same roms that started this whole flaming mess to begin with? Or do you want me to keep the Kickstart 3.0 roms I have and attempt to run Workbench 3.2 on them?

[kolla]

Well, since you already write that you are using 3.0 kickstart ROMs with 3.1, the “mystery” is solved - as Thomas mentioned above, it only works by luck because of a bug, and chances are high that if anything tries to fill up those 8MB of RAM, the system will crash. If you remove one simm, 3.2 kickstarts (and 3.1) will work. An option is to burn custom 3.2 kickstart ROMs with card.resource (iirc) from 3.1.4 kickstart, that miraculously managed to re-introduce the bug from 3.0.  You could also try to install 3.2 kickstarts and the load card.resource from 3.1.4 or 3.0 using LoadModule when you need pcmcia. But with all these “working” solutions, you run the risk of random crashes should something try to actually use all that ram (of which quite a few bytes of address space is pointing to the pcmcia rather than actual ram).

Modern RAM cards typically has reset options to switch between 4 or 8 MB of fast ram, so that we only boot to 4MB when we know we’ll be needing pcmcia. Like on one a600 I got, where I do the opposite, boot with 4MB fast RAM by default and only press ctrl-a-a a liitle extra long to get 8MB just occasionally when needed.

[PunkTiger]

Well, since you already write that you are using 3.0 kickstart ROMs with 3.1, the “mystery” is solved - as Thomas mentioned above, it only works by luck because of a bug, and chances are high that if anything tries to fill up those 8MB of RAM, the system will crash. If you remove one simm, 3.2 kickstarts (and 3.1) will work. An option is to burn custom 3.2 kickstart ROMs with card.resource (iirc) from 3.1.4 kickstart, that miraculously managed to re-introduce the bug from 3.0.  You could also try to install 3.2 kickstarts and the load card.resource from 3.1.4 or 3.0 using LoadModule when you need pcmcia. But with all these “working” solutions, you run the risk of random crashes should something try to actually use all that ram (of which quite a few bytes of address space is pointing to the pcmcia rather than actual ram).

Modern RAM cards typically has reset options to switch between 4 or 8 MB of fast ram, so that we only boot to 4MB when we know we’ll be needing pcmcia. Like on one a600 I got, where I do the opposite, boot with 4MB fast RAM by default and only press ctrl-a-a a liitle extra long to get 8MB just occasionally when needed.

This is the most removed I've ever felt from the Amiga community. I now realize that I have neither the knowledge, nor the equipment (and in some cases, the software) to do pretty much any of the steps you've mentioned in your reply. I never realized getting the PCMCIA slot to work on the 1200 was such an absolute crap shoot, and that it was blind, stupid luck that I got a machine where it just miraculously worked.

As for Workbench 3.2, it's staying off my 1200. I give up. I've had enough. Another $50 that I shouldn't have spent gone right down the crapper. And now that my faulty hard drive is more sensitive than a sunburned back, the last piece of the karma pie is that I'll reformat it, reinstall WB3.1, and have the card slot not work again for literally no reason. But, I'm being defeatist. Tomorrow is another day, and all that.