Amiga A2000 + GVP SCSI HD Controller

[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. Stick with the GVP, which can also have up to 8MB fastmem and of course it autoconfigs. Obviously the best would be a Blizzard 2060 w/SCSI, but even then I'd keep a HD on the GVP if I'd ever want to boot into 68000 mode.

I've used a GVP with both an A2000 German rev A and a with my current rev 6 A2000, so compatibility is most likely not a problem. As Azryl mentioned, check that the jumpers are set correct.

Is there any memory on the GVP board? If so, what size? If there's memory on another board in your system and the total exceeds 8MB that could be your problem...

/Martin

[AdMartin]

Actually, my German rev A A2000 that I used to have read rev 4 on the mobo... I guess it's popularly called rev 3.9 because the rev B A2000s started with rev 4 also...

I think KS 1.2 supports autoboot if the boot partition uses OFS. Kickstart 1.3 added support for RDB, so that FFS could be put in the RDB. But maybe I remember incorrectly.

/Martin

[AdMartin]

The GVP board is SCSI ID 7, I think, unless you set it to something else. Run the prep tool on the GVP install disk and you'll be able to scroll through the IDs of all SCSI units. I think there's one basic version and one expert version (or pro or something). Run the expert version to get the info.

Also, if you format the HD with FFS (which is recommended), you have to put FFS into the RDB, because kickstart 1.3 only has OFS in the ROM, IIRC. I think there's an 'add file system' or similar option in the prep utility somewhere. FFS can be loaded from the Workbench 1.3 disk.

/Martin

[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