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Amiga computer related discussion => Amiga Hardware Issues and discussion => Topic started by: offline on January 09, 2011, 02:09:53 PM
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I own an Amiga 500 with a GVP HD. I was using it yesterday and everything was running like a champ then today I go boot it and its just prompting me to insert a disk and not booting off of the hard drive. Would anyone happen to know some steps that could help me get the drive to boot again without having to reload it?
Thanks for any help!
Chris Edwards
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Well, did you put in the WB disk to see if it is still there?
Are you running 3.1?
If so, see if the board is still recognized in the startup menu. You may have to just clean a connection or two...
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So I put in the WB 3.1 disk and held both the mouse buttons down to get to the boot options. Looking at the boot options I only see DF0 and DF1 no DH0. When I boot the system it tries several times to access the drive before failing.
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ok, did you look in the startup sequence to also see if the GVP HD card is recognized? If you have any other expansion boards they'd be listed here as well.
If you have never done this before, just know that you will not get a name but a code for the GVP HD card. What that # is I don't know off hand :( but if it is the only addon board you have then it will either be blank or show you the one (or two if it also has RAM on it) GVP card.
And the reason yo'd put in the 3.1 WB disk is to let it boot off of it and see what Icons/drives come up.
Good luck!
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I am not seeing the hard drive after booting to 3.1 off the floppy drive.
I really have no clue how to look at the startup sequence. The last time I owned an Amiga I had no hard drive with it.
Thanks for your help,
Chris
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First off, you don't have to look in the startup-sequence, I think the poster means the "Expansion board diagnostic..." in the "Early startup control" menu. Startup-Sequence is a text file with commands executed when booting, and that obviously needs to harddrive to be present in order for one to look in it.
Which GVP controller is it? If it's a GP HD8+ like mine, have you set it to "Game switch" or "Auto boot"? It has to be at "Auto boot" in order to boot from the harddrive, otherwise you disable the SCSI controller. Switch over when you have powered off the computer and drive, power up again and see if it makes a difference.
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Ahh... I have attached a screen picture of my "Expansion Board Diagnostic".
It is a A500-HD+ GVP with 8MB of RAM. The hard drive that was in it orginaly was bad so I put a new one in it and loaded the 3.1 onto it with no problems. I have been playing with it for a few months now. But unlike modern PC's/Servers I have no clue how to start to diagnose an Amiga.
It is set to Autoboot, I have not change that and flipping makes do difference on getting it to boot.
Thanks again for the help!
Chris
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Well, the controller and ram is fine it seems, so maybe you should check the cable inside.
If you boot from your WB disk, do you see 8 MB of fast ram??
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I do see the ram. It is also trying to seek on the hard drive when I boot it up. Is their a disk or program I can run to see if it has some type of bad boot sector?
What cable should I check? The SCSI?
Thanks!!
Chris
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If the drive is making funny noises (scratching, clicking) or not spinning up at all it's probably done with...
More constructive:
- is the drive spinning up on power on? (else: check power, SCSI cabling, termination, un-/replug cabling)
- is the drive recognized by HDToolbox or the GVP installation software?
- RDB might be corrupted
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The drive is spinning up, I can see it with the GVP Tools Fast Prep. So lets assume the drive is not bad what else could be wrong?
Thanks,
Chris
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Yes, the SCSI cable, but it might be a good idea as well to check the cable to the switch.
However, sounds more like the drive is acting up, so you would be best off checking the harddrive as Zac67 suggests. I would start with the partition software to see if the drive can actually be found by the system.
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Haha yes, I mean the early Expansion board diagnostic you can see with both mouse buttons pressed. I apologize for the confusion...:(
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I'm interested allso :) I've excatly same system. My problem is that hd works 5-10minits before it crash, over heating I ques.
I've working 4gb IBM scsi hd and I'm planning to replase old with it.
Kickstart is 1.3 so I wondering what kind of problems I can wait
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Hi Chris,
I was about to point you in the direction of a great program written by thomas which saved all of my data under similar circumstances :)
http://aminet.net/search?query=rdbrecov
But unfortunately it says this in the readme file:-
Use RDBrecov if you lost the RDB (partitioning information) of your
harddisk.
RDBrecov searches an entire harddisk for partitions. It can handle PFS2,
PFS3, AFS and SFS partitions.
D'oh!
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What is the default file system for the Amiga? That's what I used when setting the drive up. Will this RDBrecov tool not work for me?
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Sounds like FFS. As it seems, the readme also states "Since V0.6 it also finds FFS partitions. As FFS needs the partition size for calculating the rootblock position, first all possible FFS bootblocks are stored in a table and in a second pass the rootblock positions are calculated and checked."
Worth a try.
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So it sounds like I may have formatted the disk with the wrong file system or one that is not very efficient with error recovery. What is the best file system to use?
Chris
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So I reloaded the drive with SFS and made each partition less than 2 gigs. Everything seems to be good. I know this is a silly question but I have to ask, how do I verify that the new partitions are actually SFS? No "fdisk -l".
Thanks for all the help,
Chris