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Amiga computer related discussion => Amiga Hardware Issues and discussion => Topic started by: Kay on March 09, 2003, 12:48:40 AM
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I have encountered a problem I was hoping someone here might be able to help me with: After installing my new 120GB harddrive, my system (A1200/060/PPC/Mediator) suddenly needs ages to boot. I sprinkled my startup-sequence with "echo"-es to see when the delay occurs, and it turns out it happens before anything in the startup-sequence is executed. So what happens at boot-up is:
1. The two rapid diskdrive clicks which always happens before bootup occurs.
2. 2-3 minutes of inactivity.
3. startup-sequence is executed.
Has anyone encountered anything like this before? Suggestions would be appreciated, this is getting annyoing.
Kay
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Yes.
I used to get that with the PPC board in and any good sized HD. PPC board off and it booted fine ( with a Blizzard 060 in place ).
No idea what causes it, but hitting cntrl-amiga-amiga a few times seemed to cure it.
Mind you I ended up with a motherboard that refused to start up in the end so don't take my advice.
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@Kay
Would it be possible to have anything to do with the CDRom ddrive? Seems I recall something about the Amiga taking a certain amount of time before doing anything, waiting for some kind of signal from the CDRom. Just grabbing at straws, I'm not real techie material, but I seem to remember reading something about that. My A2000 used to take forever to boot, leaving a cd in the drive seemed to help.
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Some boot delays explained:
(1) Previous system booted from EIDE drive. SCSI now booting: Answer - EIDE drive buss "seek" still performed, delays boot by 30-45 secs. Need to install short EIDE cable with the proper wire jumpers and resistors. EMAIL me for the txt file.
(2) Too many partitions and devices. Each drive partition and device is "seeked" to determine location of boot flag. Answer: Re-think your partitions. Remove tendency to create backup partitions that mirror others. If you must do this, use ONE partition and then create directories (backupDH0: backupDH1:) within.
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How many buffers does your 120gb HD have and what sort of filesystem do you have on your boot partition?
Regards,
Michal Bergseth, editor of Amitopia
url: www.amitopia.tk
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Is it really possible to use such a big drive
with the AMIGA ?
Is it really nessecary for you ?
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@DaveP:
It didn't happen with my 80GB drive, though. I look forward to removing the PPC card once OS4 is ready. I better hang on to it for now, though. :-)
@artman:
There is certainly something wrong with the way the CDRW drive is working, as it always needs an extra reboot to be recognized. Still, this didn't happen when I was using my old HD. I tried leaving a CD in, and it had no effect. :-/
@Amiga4k:
If I am required to make any hardware modifications, I won't bother. I'm guessing I will downgrade my computer as soon as OS4 is released. As for the partitioning: I set up my new drive like my old one: 9 partitions and a lot of unused space at the end. Do you think 9 is too much?
@AmiDelf:
I'm using FFS and have 1000 buffers per partition. I don't see how that would make any difference, though, as the buffers are added during the startup-sequence, and the problem occurs earlier.
@duesi:
:-) Yes, it is possible, although HDToolbox fails to read the drive specs properly, requiring you to find out the number of cylinders for yourself. I don't really need all 120GB right now, but I'm planning for the future, and the 120GB was an economic option. I used to think my 30GB would last forever, but thanks to some large games (which I like to install completely to harddrive), and a fast Internet connection, it didn't take me long to run out of space.
Thanks for the input so far, guys, keep it coming... :-)
Kay
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Have you checked your Primary/Master/Slave pin terminations on the HD itself?
Skippy
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Nine partitions on a 120Gb drive means 13.33Gb each (average). Do you have the appropriate IDE hardware/software to handle 13Mb virtual drives?
Each drive must be tested and validated before the system gets out of DOS and goes into the Startup-sequence, LoadWB, User-startup, etc. This obviously takes a bit of time. It could be several minutes if your software isn't optimised for 'Large' partitions (ie bigger than '4Gb').
Cheers,
JaXanim
http://waveguide.v-2-1.net
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@Skippy:
I think they should be set correctly, but I'll double check it later.
@JaXanim:
I'm using the standard A1200 IDE interface, and OS3.9. My partitions range in size from 200MB to 20GB.
Kay
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Do you have the appropriate IDE hardware/software to handle 13Mb virtual drives?
He had 80gig working, so I'd imagine he has.
Each drive must be tested and validated before the system gets out of DOS and goes into the Startup-sequence, LoadWB, User-startup, etc. This obviously takes a bit of time. It could be several minutes if your software isn't optimised for 'Large' partitions (ie bigger than '4Gb').
That's just load of bollocks.
No validation is done at all when the partitions are ok. Validation only happens if drive is found to be in invalid state.
You can't optimize software for large partitions. You can have large partition support, but has nothing to do with speed. If the application has no large partition support (disk repair tool, reorg tool etc), it will *corrupt* RDB/partitions that lie on <4gig area when accessing data past the 4gig barrier.