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Amiga computer related discussion => Amiga Hardware Issues and discussion => Topic started by: tonyvdb on February 13, 2015, 09:36:02 PM
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So my GVP A4008 SCSI controller is set up not to boot on startup my question is if I copy the full drive over from my IDE hard drive and set it as the boot device will that improve speed/reliability?
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So you're asking if the GVP A4008 is faster than the stock motherboard IDE of an A4000, correct?
Pretty much 100% yes, unless you've got something badly misconfigured. Obviously this opens up a whole other can of worms, you can research things like the FastATA (a faster IDE interface), or various Zorro III SCSI cards that are faster than the Zorro II on the A4008, and then what kind of drive you have connected to both (which obviously makes a huge difference), etc.
But if your choices are between those two only, and all else being the same, I'd go with the SCSI card. ;)
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Yes, my A4000. I already have it hooked up and just have an old SCSI drive on it but I have a nice 68pin Atlas 10K SCSI drive that I want to use (I have the 68 to 50pin converters).
Is it as simple as copying everything over to the new SCSI drive after formatting it correctly and changing the jumper on the GVP to make it boot just as it did before with the IDE drive?
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You'll need to prep it in HDToolbox and set it's boot priority relative to your existing drive, but otherwise, yes.
Disclaimer: something could always go wrong. ;)
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LOL, not worried given I still have the IDE drive to fall back on. It will become my backup.
Thanks for your help as always.
Tony
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To preserve the time/date stamps on your files, make sure to use the CLONE switch on the Copy command (if using the Shell).
Copy DH0: NEWDH0: ALL CLONE
If using a directory utility, just check in the options that it will preserve the date stamps on your files. The date stamps aren't important to the functionality of your computer, but my personal preference is that they are preserved.
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Ok that brings me to my next question. What is the best way to clone my old drive onto the new SCSI drive? This is an area I'm not familiar with on the Amiga.
I was going to simply copy the files over.
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Ok that brings me to my next question. What is the best way to clone my old drive onto the new SCSI drive? This is an area I'm not familiar with on the Amiga.
I was going to simply copy the files over.
Right. What Paul said. Prep the new drive and copy the files over. Should be good to go! :)
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Right. What Paul said. Prep the new drive and copy the files over. Should be good to go! :)
Reason #435 that I love the Amiga :)
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Ok, so my quantum Atlas drive is a 9.2gb.
I know it's best to only use 4gb of that space so what is the best way for me to do this.
In the GVP hard drive tools program it is only showing up as a 567mb drive. 99660 is the highest Cylinder. Do I simply increase that value?
Also I have SFS but it's not seeming to be an option on the file system option.
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In slow motion: "Noooooo!!!" Don't use GVP FaaastPrep! It's only designed for hard drives from the '80s, and will ruin anything else! Use the latest version of HDToolbox to prep your drive. If you use SFS or PFS and have patched your OS you can create partitions as big as you want. But for the sake of "not having to bang your head against a wall figuring stuff out", make it 4GB makes it easy.
I usually do 1 partition of around 500MB for Workbench, one of 1-2GB for Work:, sometimes one for Documents, and one for games. Split it up, don't make just one big partition, and again - keeping it inside the first 4GB keeps it compatible. ;)
Edit: You do have 3.9 though, so you should already have all the tools you need...
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Ok, thanks.
I'm trying to do this within my OS 3.1 so I should switch over to the 3.9 OS and do it from there?
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Ok, thanks.
I'm trying to do this within my OS 3.1 so I should switch over to the 3.9 OS and do it from there?
IMHO you should always use the latest version of the OS, especially since 3.9 contains a lot of improvements for large drive support. You are going to put 3.9 on your new drive, right? ;)
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I made an awful video recently. This might help you. ;)
http://www.amiga.org/forums/showthread.php?t=68805
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Well, 3.9 would be ideal however it does not support the video toaster so I'm going to have to stick with 3.1
I use 3.9 for when I'm not using the Toaster and just want to play games.
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If you have a 100GB drive then the conventional wisdom says you should have your boot partition be less than 4GB like say 3.9GB or whatever. And then you can have a 96GB WORK: partition.
That is assuming you are using an uptodate AmigaOS distro.
Thomas is the preeminent expert on these matters. If he shows up then please listen to whatever he says.
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Well, 3.9 would be ideal however it does not support the video toaster so I'm going to have to stick with 3.1
I use 3.9 for when I'm not using the Toaster and just want to play games.
I keep forgetting that. Dang! No one ever figured out a solution why it doesn't work? Is it a particular library, or something?
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As far as I know there was a workaround in 3.5 but no one got it working in 3.9
Is there a newer version of the HD toolbox that I can install on OS3.1 that will recognize the GVP controller?
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Well, 3.9 would be ideal however it does not support the video toaster so I'm going to have to stick with 3.1
I use 3.9 for when I'm not using the Toaster and just want to play games.
These types of things are why you should always keep your boot partition contained entirely within the 4GB limit.
Because when switching things around or installing patches or something, something could go bonkers temporarily and you might lose access to your partitions that are above the 4GB barrier.
You would never want to temporarily lose access to your boot partition. That would just suxxorize your day.
You can patch OS3.1 up to safely use all your 9GB drive no problem. Having just fallen out of a timewarp, my head is all wobbly and I can't remember the procedure. But there are various people out there who can give you detailed instructions. :)
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Well, 3.9 would be ideal however it does not support the video toaster
What? :hammer: I didn't know that! Good thing I'll be using a Buddah with TrueIDE & 2 CF cards for hardware multiboot!
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Ok that brings me to my next question. What is the best way to clone my old drive onto the new SCSI drive? This is an area I'm not familiar with on the Amiga.
I was going to simply copy the files over.
CLI>C:COPY OLD: NEW: ALL CLONE BUF=5000 QUIET
The buffer amount depends on the amount of Fast RAM (5000 = 2.5 MB) you have free and want to use.
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When you use an SCSI 3 drive you will need Active Termination on the bus as it may not be recognized and even if it is, may have transfer errors.
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CLI>C:COPY OLD: NEW: ALL CLONE BUF=5000 QUIET
The buffer amount depends on the amount of Fast RAM (5000 = 2.5 MB) you have free and want to use.
Thanks Beave! That's some good info right there! :)
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The 4gb barrier has to do with two things: the device driver (e.g., scsi.device) and the filesystem (e.g., FastFileSystem). Well, three things: also the hard drive prep utility's ability to understand the higher capacities as well.
3.9 fixes all of these, but I don't know if it fixes gvpscsi.device (it might). So it's easiest to prep a drive under 3.9. It can be done under 3.1 but it's more complicated, since all three components will need to be patched/substituted manually. An easy way to get access to the 3.9 tools is to use the 3.9 installer to create an emergency disk and then boot from that. No installation required!
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Ok, I've been trying to do this without driving everyone crazy with questions but can't find the answer so...
In OS 3.9 when I go to HD toolbox it does not "see" the drive on the GVP controller. What am I missing?
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Ok, I've been trying to do this without driving everyone crazy with questions but can't find the answer so...
In OS 3.9 when I go to HD toolbox it does not "see" the drive on the GVP controller. What am I missing?
Are you sure the drive is terminated correctly?
Are you sure it's scanning gvpscsi.device and not just scsi.device? You can change this via tooltypes if you need to, but as far as I can recall 3.9 is pretty smart and should scan all available devices. Heck, it even found the USB devices on my system. ;) I'd check termination first.
I'm sure you already confirmed that the drive is powering up, right? :rofl:
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The drive shows up under OS3.1 using the GVP tools and yes its terminated.
Do I still have to install anything to OS3.9 or is that all included (for 3.1 you had to install the GVP device stuff)
Where do I change the tooltypes?
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Well, 3.9 would be ideal however it does not support the video toaster so I'm going to have to stick with 3.1 I use 3.9 for when I'm not using the Toaster and just want to play games.
Wait... what? I have a 3.9 system that works with a Video Toaster, had two but I think I let the smoke out of the Toaster 4000. I know there's a reaction/whatever the other one is called in that the Toaster 4.3 install breaks some libraries but I just copy the whole libs: devs: storage/ and locale/ dirs back over and it works again.
On the topic at hand the A4008 has always been finicky for me about termination also there are a couple jumpers on it that I can't find doc on(lost mine long ago), but there's this story about the older GVP SCSI+8 burning a trace on the daughterboard, makes me nervous about playing the jumpers on the A4008.
http://www.wonkity.com/~wblock/a4000hard/excrdnot.html
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I have the GVP working just fine with an older SCSI drive but I want to use this better Quantum Atlas I have.
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The drive shows up under OS3.1 using the GVP tools and yes its terminated.
Do I still have to install anything to OS3.9 or is that all included (for 3.1 you had to install the GVP device stuff)
Where do I change the tooltypes?
You change the tooltypes by right-clicking on the icon and selecting Icons -> Information. You can see in this screenshot of mine that I have it set to "ASKDEVICE" so it will scan everything. If I wanted to I could specify a specific device by removing the paranthesis from the next line, and changing that, i.e., to gvpscsi.device.
Just being honest here, please take this as constructive criticism, it makes me a little nervous that you're trying to change these settings without even knowing what tooltypes are. Don't worry though, we'll get you squared away. ;)
Also, what version of the GVP ROM are you using? If it's anything below 4.15 or the GuruROM, stop right now and upgrade that first. You can buy 4.15 ROM's on ebay or amibay for under $20.
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You want to buy from this guy, tjlazah:
http://www.ebay.com/itm/Amiga-4091-GVP-or-Supra-Series-III-SCSI-ROM-update-/131422770900
GVP 4.15 ROM, if you have anything below that. Guru ROM is better but almost impossible to find because it requires a small PCB interface between the chip and the board.
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When I have different HDD controllers in the same Amiga, I make one copy for each different device (I'm a simpleton), so I have an HDToolbox for the scsi.device and one for the gvpscsi.device (only the .info is changed with the device driver type).
You will want the most updated .device of each type (I use BoingBag #4 for the scsi.device) to get the drive size to show full capacity. The wrong capacity works (once it is formatted wrong), but that is a sucky solution (IMHO).
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Ok, my tooltypes is set up this way,
ASKDEVICE
(SCSI_DEVICE_NAME=scsi.device)
(HIDEDVICES=driver1deviceldr
ver2.device)
(MFSAVEPATH=RAM)
So I change the =SCSI.device to (gvpscsi.device)?
I don't know what rom I have as the label on the GVP is faded. But as you show it should show up in the HD toolbox and it's not.
Understandable about the critisizum, I was much better at this back in the 90s but it's been so long I've lost what I learned but it's coming back slowly.
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You would use either the ASKDEVICE tag or the named device tag. As you can see in my screenshot I'm using the ASKDEVICE, and it's polling everything. Even my RapidRoad USB interface (and all it's associated options) shows up.
So if you wanted to try the named device option, you'd change it to:
(ASKDEVICE)
SCSI_DEVICE_NAME=gvpscsi.device
(no paranthesis on the second line)
Then it should scan just that particular device.
Pretty certain that the .device for GVP controllers is stored in the ROM, so it should be loaded at bootup. Try this: run SysInfo (latest version 4.0 can be downloaded here: http://sysinfo.d0.se/ ) and scroll through till you see your list of installed expansions or devices. Are you seeing a gvpscsi.device at all (when you're booted up in 3.9)?
No worries man, I took a nearly 10-year break from owning any Amiga hardware, it it all came back to me "fairly" fast, LOL. ;)
As a last thought, when you run HDToolbox your motherboard controller shows up at least, right? (will probably be named scsi.device even though it's technically IDE). ;)
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Do this from a CLI prompt:
version gvpscsi.device
You can also try the mounter in sys:tools/ change the tooltype to DEVICE=gvpscsi.device
When you open it after setting the tooltype see if it trys to scan 0-6 or crashes?
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Well after a couple days of other things going on I'm back at it, so this is what I've found.
The GVP shows up just fin under workbench 3.1 and the new drive I want to use does also. As soon as a switch to the CF card that has OS3.9 I can't get it to show trying all of your suggestions above however the odd thing is the 8mb of ram I have installed on that card is reporting?? This makes no sense.
If I change the toolbox to search just for the gvpscsi.device nothing shows up but when I run it normal the CF card and CD drive so that's working.
So again in 3.1 the GVP shows up and so does the drive. I installed all the boing bags so I just don't understand.
And yes the rom version is 4.13
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Something to try is getting the binddrivers version 4.15 of the gvpscsi.device from Ralph Babel's site, put it in sys:expansion on your OS39 drive. I'm not sure if that will override the one on the board but you should be able to remove the ROM from the socket on the A4008 as well. Binddrivers will then load the gvpscsi.device instead of the older one on the ROM.
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Ok, got the GVP to show up in OS3.9
Next question in the HD toolbox when your at the formatting section how do you use SFS instead of FFS?
Never mind, I figured it out.
One more question, when I format partitions I've kept them all under 2gb and the system partition is only 500mb
How come only my first two partitions show up when I have rebooted the computer. I don't see the other three?
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The gvpscsi.device isn't NSD compliant so you want to use PFS in direct SCSI mode. Or you could use the old direct SCSI version of SFS.
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Is the PFS available in the setup tools for the drive? SFS is.
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If you're using ClassicWB then yeah PFS is in the Myfiles/Install/Largehd directory where SFS is. The docs are in there too. You'll need to do what you did with SFS at some point and select the PFS driver you want in HDtoolbox enter a dostype and copy the pfs-handler to L: Remember to follow the PFSds instructions.