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Amiga computer related discussion => Amiga Hardware Issues and discussion => Topic started by: madgrizzle on July 20, 2017, 01:11:17 PM
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I have a GVP A2000-030 Combo with a 3.12 ROM in it. I've been trying to get it to work with a PCD-50B and 3.12 recognized the drive, but not an inserted 4 GB SD Card (the PCD-50B lights blink around and stop briefly on the SD card when inserted which tells me it's getting recognized as being there by something). I tried formatting it FAT32 and FAT.. nothing worked. So I figured I needed to upgrade the GVP ROM based upon what I read here. Since I don't have a ROM yet, I disabled the ROM on the GVP and put 4.15 drivers in the expansion folder on the boot disk (I'm booting from an OS3.9 emergency boot disk at the moment).
My understanding is that the BINDDRIVERS command in the startup-sequence would load those drivers... which appears to be what happens.. everything looks normal during boot.. the floppy drive grinds away, CDROM fires up, back and forth, over and over.. But.. then everything is quiet and I'm left with a black screen. Never shows me the workbench. I tried many things last night, but I think that I get a black screen if there is a SD card inserted into the PCD-50B and a 8000 0005 error if its empty (I'm tired and can't remember everything). Regardless, there's a problem. I did the same thing with the old hard drive in place of the PCD-50B and got either the black screen or the 8000 0005 error (can't recall which.. I think the 8000 0005 error.. but that's when I went to bed). I've checked the termination and everything is good (I can boot to the hard drive and use the CDROM.. the only devices on the GVP's SCSI controller.)
If I put a 4.15 ROM in, would I not get the same results as using BINDDRIVERS? If so, what could be causing it to do this. If I re-enable the 3.12 ROM, everything works fine (except I'm back to square one with recognizing the SD card in the PCD-50B). Is there any other GVP software that gets called, like gvpscsictrl, during boot that may be incompatible with v4.15? I didn't copy that file onto the boot disk. I'll do more investigating this evening of the startup-sequence I guess..
John
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Binddrivers expects all drivers loaded to be compatible with the Kickstart versions.
You can patch 3.1 to have 64 bit support for big partitions (over 2GB) BUT YOU CANNOT BOOT OFF SUCH A DEVICE.
Try a boot partition of 1GB on the card. 3.1 is 32 bit only, can't boot off big partitions.
EDIT: 4.15 also expect a different version of gvpscsi.device from what I understand here, direct download is 2nd link
http://babel.de/amiga.html
http://babel.de/download/gvpscsi4.tar.bz2
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Binddrivers expects all drivers loaded to be compatible with the Kickstart versions.
You can patch 3.1 to have 64 bit support for big partitions (over 2GB) BUT YOU CANNOT BOOT OFF SUCH A DEVICE.
Try a boot partition of 1GB on the card. 3.1 is 32 bit only, can't boot off big partitions.
EDIT: 4.15 also expect a different version of gvpscsi.device from what I understand here, direct download is 2nd link
The problem is I can't even get the computer to fully boot off a floppy when I put gvpscsi.device v4.15 in the expansion directory of OS3.9 Emergency Boot Disk and I disable the 3.12 ROM on the GVP. I'm not trying to boot from a hard drive or SD/CF card at this immediate time, just trying to get the workbench to show up using 4.15 binddrivers. It appears to load up (floppy and CDROM go through their gyrations) but there's nothing but a black screen at the end of the boot process. Do I not understand the use of binddrivers? I thought that if I disabled the ROM on the GVP, I could in effect, upgrade the GVP to 4.15 using binddrivers without replacing the ROM chip (recognizing I can't boot from it). Am I wrong?
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It sounds like you're doing the right thing in terms of disabling the onboard ROM and putting the driver in SYS:Expansion on your boot floppy.
But those card readers use SCSI LUNs, a method of getting multiple SCSI devices at a single SCSI address. i.e., each slot on that card is a different LUN. LUNs are complicated and difficult to get working correctly. I don't know how well the GVP card supports LUNs, either in hardware or software. At a quick glance, I don't see any jumper settings related to LUNs on the GVP 030 boards.
But LUN 0 on those card readers is the PCMCIA slot. It's sort of the default, fallback slot. Try using a CF card via a PCMCIA-to-CF adapter in that slot instead of putting something directly into the SD or CF slots. What happens if all slots are empty when you try to boot?
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Well, the problem also occurs with a hard drive in place of the PCD-50B (which doesn't use LUNS). I suspect with only the CDROM and floppy drive on the computer, I would run into the same problem. I might redownload/extract/copy the 4.15 gvpscsi.device file again to see if that helps, but since the CDROM drive appears to be working, I wonder if that really is the problem. It's as if it gets all the way to the point to show the workbench, but just doesn't (as if the video stops working.. I just continue to get nothing but black). I'm running this out of the B&W composite output of the Amiga 2000 at the moment to eliminate as many possible sources of problems. I'll probably go through the startup-sequence tonight and edit stuff out and see if I can find a culprit there.
I copied over 4.15 gvpscsi.device and gvpscsi.info. Are there any tweaks to the .info I can do or should do?
John
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What happens if all slots are empty when you try to boot?
IIRC, when I boot with the PCD-50B attached with all slots empty, I eventually get 8000 0005 error instead of a black screen after the floppy and CDROM drives stop their gyrations. I think this is a Divide by Zero error. I will say I just recently installed more RAM in the GVP before I started messing with the PCD-50B, but the computer does boot from my old hard drive and report 13 MB of GVP RAM when I run sysinfo (but I have to re-enable the 3.12 ROM on the GVP). RAM problem that the 4.15 driver is effected by but not the 3.12?? who knows.. more things to try.
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IIRC, when I boot with the PCD-50B attached with all slots empty, I eventually get 8000 0005 error instead of a black screen after the floppy and CDROM drives stop their gyrations. I think this is a Divide by Zero error. I will say I just recently installed more RAM in the GVP before I started messing with the PCD-50B, but the computer does boot from my old hard drive and report 13 MB of GVP RAM when I run sysinfo (but I have to re-enable the 3.12 ROM on the GVP). RAM problem that the 4.15 driver is effected by but not the 3.12?? who knows.. more things to try.
is termination correct? it smacks of a termination problem or device conflict?
the pcd-50 b has a term jumper, and if its in the middle of the chain remove the jumper,if its the last device on the cable terminate it.
if the pcd is terminated and say the cdrom is last and terminated this would be a problem.
i would make a 3.1 boot floppy with hdtoolbox on it and try that after checking termination is right..
hmm floppy wont boot with gvpscsi rom 4.15... are you using a cloanto rom?? or maybe the scsi device fle you is bad?
tried 5.14 from ralphs site with the specific binddrivers there?
http://babel.de/amiga.html
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hmm floppy wont boot with gvpscsi rom 4.15... are you using a cloanto rom?? or maybe the scsi device fle you is bad?
tried 5.14 from ralphs site with the specific binddrivers there?
http://babel.de/amiga.html
Using KS3.1 from AmigaKit. It won't "completely" boot (as described above) from floppy with Ralph's 4.15 Binddrivers (gvpscsi.device / gvpscsi.info) installed in the expansion directory of an OS3.9 Emergency Boot Disk and the GVP ROM is disabled. The computer, when the the GVP ROM is enabled, will boot from the same floppy (I assume because it's not using the binddrivers but rather the drivers provided by the ROM??) This is the point I want to confirm, can I have a v3.12 ROM in the GVP, disable it, but boot from a floppy with v4.15 binddrivers. Forget the PCD-50B for now.. just trying to get the 4.15 firmware/drivers to work the the GVP Combo card.
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It sounds like you're doing the right thing in terms of disabling the onboard ROM and putting the driver in SYS:Expansion on your boot floppy.
But those card readers use SCSI LUNs, a method of getting multiple SCSI devices at a single SCSI address. i.e., each slot on that card is a different LUN. LUNs are complicated and difficult to get working correctly. I don't know how well the GVP card supports LUNs, either in hardware or software. At a quick glance, I don't see any jumper settings related to LUNs on the GVP 030 boards.
But LUN 0 on those card readers is the PCMCIA slot. It's sort of the default, fallback slot. Try using a CF card via a PCMCIA-to-CF adapter in that slot instead of putting something directly into the SD or CF slots. What happens if all slots are empty when you try to boot?
Not sure why you say luns are hard to use, if the controller supports them they work easily,
Luns originally came about to support stuff like cdrom changers,the 4,5,7,18 disc cd changers and larger.
you literally shouldn't have to do anything(short of turning lun scanning on some older controllers like 2091/590 with jumpers. the 590 manual is actually wrong, they have a jumper marked reserve that needs set for luns.Why the manual was never updated i dont know. i stumbled on this by accident.
the 2091 is horribly slow scanning luns(sometimes populating all slots of the reader with amiga formatted cards speeds them).rev7 roms on 2091/590 are best but 6.6rom works.
The gvp controllers with rom 4.13,4.15 handles luns perfectly-earlier roms can be hit and miss..
scsi on phase 5 accelerators,warp engine,etc work easily.
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Ok, so I turned off the QUIET command in startup-sequence on the OS3.9 Emergency Boot Disk and that turned the screen on for me. It goes through SetPatch and updates six different things (first is console.device, last is AmigaOS ROM Update). Then it goes quiet and eventually I get:
Volume Ram Disk is full
Click retry doesn't help. Press Cancel and get "Can't set Language" on the screen with another "Volume Ram Disk is full" dialog box. Cancel again and get Can't set Workbench with same ram disk full dialog box. Cancel again and get Can't set Kickstart ...Cancel again and I get something about IPrefs and not enough memory and then it goes to an empty workbench screen.
The GVP has 13 MB of RAM on it. I had looked at the startup-sequence and it looks like near the end, it runs the startup-sequence off the AmigaOS3.9 CD (This is the emergency boot disk that's created as part of the Install AmigaOS3.9.. wonder if that's a useful bit of information)...
Since I can't change the sequence-startup on the CDROM, is there anything in there that would consume all the RAM: space. There's some copies to RAM:, binddrivers, mounts, loadmondrvs prior to the SetENV commands that seem to fail.
Workbench 3.1 boot disk boots fine.. so that's good news.
I need to be able to boot from the AmigaOS3.9 install disk (emergency boot disk and AmigaOS3.9 CD) so I can eventually get the PCD-50B running as a boot drive. Maybe have it in the ROM and not binddrivers will work better?
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Almost there.. Ok. So I put in a 4MB Supra Board and it boots. When I gvpinfo it only shows the 4MB Supra RAM. So when I disable the ROM and load using binddrivers, I lose all memory on the GVP Combo.
Sigh...
On the good side, I can finally see the PCD-50B drivers.. HDToolBox finds them with no problem.
On the bad side.. How do I get my RAM back? Will the 4.15 ROM give me my RAM back?
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Presumably when you disable the ROM you're also disabling the onboard memory. Check your jumper settings, maybe there's a jumper to do one and not the other? These GVP cards are super-finicky and there's about a million different models, no two are alike nor are their jumpers consistent. :(
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Presumably when you disable the ROM you're also disabling the onboard memory. Check your jumper settings, maybe there's a jumper to do one and not the other? These GVP cards are super-finicky and there's about a million different models, no two are alike nor are their jumpers consistent. :(
Presumably so... I noticed J4 was off and all the documentation I had found said that it should be on. When I put it on (hey, try anything when it doesn't work) I got a "no scsi error".... So another search and I finally found this page:
http://amiga.resource.cx/exp/combo (http://amiga.resource.cx/exp/combo)
This is the only one that matches my model exactly. 030 22 MHz with all the jumpers in all the right place and J4 disabling SCSI. Unfortunately, there's not a lot of description about the all the other jumpers on the board and certainly nothing I see that readily says "don't ditch ram when ROM is enabled"..
So in all, sometime next week I'll have the ROM (I hope) and I can finally start using the Amiga.
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So in all, sometime next week I'll have the ROM (I hope) and I can finally start using the Amiga.
Instead of playing with jumpers: Why not just remove the boot ROM, physically?
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Instead of playing with jumpers: Why not just remove the boot ROM, physically?
Well, this whole thing started because I was trying to get a PCD-50B I got off ebay to work in the Amiga with the ultimate goal of booting from a CF disk in it. It didn't work with the GVP with a 3.12 ROM in it. The black screen issue came about because I was trying to get the 4.15 binddrivers to work to verify that the the PCD-50B wasn't causing the problem. But, there's no use really trying to get the RAM back with ROM disabled because I have to have a ROM in the GVP to boot from the PCD-50B. Maybe I'll try it.. got nothing else to do until the ROM arrives.
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Using KS3.1 from AmigaKit. It won't "completely" boot (as described above) from floppy with Ralph's 4.15 Binddrivers (gvpscsi.device / gvpscsi.info) installed in the expansion directory of an OS3.9 Emergency Boot Disk and the GVP ROM is disabled. The computer, when the the GVP ROM is enabled, will boot from the same floppy (I assume because it's not using the binddrivers but rather the drivers provided by the ROM??) This is the point I want to confirm, can I have a v3.12 ROM in the GVP, disable it, but boot from a floppy with v4.15 binddrivers. Forget the PCD-50B for now.. just trying to get the 4.15 firmware/drivers to work the the GVP Combo card.
Maybe they switch it back for 3.5 and 3.9, but AFAIK from KS 2 onwards, you have to put devices in devs drawer the your boot disk, not expansion drawer. That was for KS and Workbench 1.3, for adding hardware.
If PATH has been added for Expansion drawer, I would guess binddrivers would find the device anyway (it would search every PATH'd directory for all .device files). But if the gvpscis.device is in the wrong drawer and binddrivers can't find it, that would be an issue.
Isnt there a handler file as well that has to go in L drawer of boot disk? I don't seem to recall one for GVP hard disks. Again, more of a old school hard drive problem rather than the later ones, GVP much more plug and play.
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Maybe they switch it back for 3.5 and 3.9, but AFAIK from KS 2 onwards, you have to put devices in devs drawer the your boot disk, not expansion drawer.
Actually, no. "BindDrivers" does and always had scanned "SYS:Expansions" scanned, and nothing else. What you find there are typically (though not necessarily only) devices, in the sense of "exec device".
What resides in "L:" is and always have been "handlers" in the sense of the dos.library. Unfortunately, and due to the Tripos legacy, handlers are also sometimes called "Devices", though that is a completely different concept. It is unrelated to the expansion mechanism. The command that is responsible for bringing up "Devices" from "L:" is "mount", not "BindDrivers".
What "BindDrivers" does is that it scans the Zorro port for expansions that are not yet configured, and then checks all the icons(!) in SYS:Expansion for a matching product and manufacturer ID, then loads them.
Hence, everything in SYS:Expansion must be associated with a ".info" file (i.e. an "icon"), and the product and manufacturer ID in the icon (select "Info" from the workbench menu) must match your expansion. In specific, such a product and vendor ID must exist in first place.
Isnt there a handler file as well that has to go in L drawer of boot disk?
If this is a gvpscsi, all what is needed is a filing system. The FFS resides already in ROM and does not need to go elsewhere. This said, L:FastFileSystem does certainly not hurt, but is typically not used (unless explicitly mandated).
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I have a GVP A2000-030 Combo with a 3.12 ROM in it. I've been trying to get it to work with a PCD-50B and 3.12 recognized the drive, but not an inserted 4 GB SD Card (the PCD-50B lights blink around and stop briefly on the SD card when inserted which tells me it's getting recognized as being there by something).
Are you sure the PCD-50B definitely supports SDHC cards?
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Are you sure the PCD-50B definitely supports SDHC cards?
I was able to insert and partition a 32 GB sd card. However, I am having trouble getting any card on the PCD-50B to mount.
I have a 4GB CF card installed and partitioned it in HDToolBox, but when I reboot the computer, no partitions appear. When I go back to HDToolBox, they're all there.. just nothing mounts. I'm still using binddrivers and booting from a floppy. So I swapped in my old hard drive and I get the same thing (it won't appear with binddrivers).
So, now what do I do? The CDROM shows up, but I see a CD mount file in devs on the boot floppy. Do I need to create mount files to mount the drives because I'm using binddrivers?
Update:
Well, the HDToolBox detected the 32 GB SDCard as a 3.6 GB card. So, not sure about SDHCs.
Also, apparently I need to run gvpscsictrl to get the partitions to mount.
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Instead of playing with jumpers: Why not just remove the boot ROM, physically?
Removing the ROM and returning the jumper to re-enable it had the same affect as removing the jumper (disabling it). RAM still missing. So, the ROM needs to be there for the RAM.. maybe there's a RAM binddriver, but at this point, I'm just going to wait for the 4.15 ROM to arrive.
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Enable your ROM
Connect your device, leave the power off.
Boot from a disk with a stripped down OS of the ROM you are using.
On the disk, Include a GVPSCSICTRL tool from the GVP utilities disk.
Have a partition tool handy. If not FastPrep/ExpertPrep, then have HDToolBox handy. Use HDToolBox gvpscsi.device
After boot up*, add power to your device.
To rescan the bus for missed devices, you can use gvpscsictrl -r
Use your partitioning tool.
Note that I think there is either an incompatible file system in the boot block, or more likely corrupted boot block information on that media. The above rescan should be more tolerant of the bad boot block.
some gvpscsictrl info - http://www.verycomputer.com/2_a4679a1bc606cb53_1.htm
gvpscsi.device is tolerant of LUNs on devices, but some devices that make LUNs are stupid and can sometimes mirror devices at higher LUNs. Note that there is a LastLUN feature in the RDB (seen in ExpertPrep screen) if you encounter this kind of thing.
*Binddrivers also works at this point if the ROM is disabled and driver in Expansion folder of SYS: - test your v4.15 Expansion drawer version with no ROM enabled this way.
Disabling/removing the ROM causes the RAM not to be software-mapped into the memory list. AddMem 01000000-01FFFFFF (for 16MB, less for less installed). if you need it in a pinch. ROM mapping is the better way.
This kind of thing was an issue on the A3001 AT interface if the old prep tools corrupted the boot block or the FFS installed in the boot block. The binddrivers way was how we cleared it.
Robert Miranda - Fmr GVP Tech Support.
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For historical purposes, v3.07 was the first release of gvpscsi.device. Longer bus scan on ID 0 and other IDs to make sure slower devices were found. First Series I support. Much better removable media support, and more efficient Polled I/O performance on the Series I. Many bugs of the 33C93/33C93A were worked around. Driver seeks out FastRAM or 32-bit FastRAM RAM to copy itself into. Good LUN support. SCSI-driect compliant and RDB compliant programming interface.
3.12 was a change to the scan process, faster boot was the result (shorter scan period). GVPSCSICtrl added to rescan (insert in startup) as needed, or run manually if a device gets powered later. First Combo030 support appeared here.
Versions from 3.12 to 3.15 were mainly additions for the first group of 68030 + RAM + SCSI cards. One was a bug fix for a DMA to onboard 32-bit RAM bug found on the Rev3 surface-mount version. Another was to recognize the Rev 4 card that replaced it (these were the Combo 030 cards, with surface-mount 68030's), and another was to incorporate a few hack fixes for HC8/A500HD8 Series II like the AdSpeed 68000 cache accelerator that fails to hook the OS cache control routines (though illegally tried to sniff the Zorro expansion bus, but doesn't cache ChipRAM because of the same issue - you are not allowed), the serial.device fixes to limit heavy DMA transfers when time-sensitive serial.deivce is open at higher baud rates, and maybe some others I am not recalling. 3.15 is the last version to support the Series I cards. SCSI-level code was not modified as far as I know after 3.12. I have a v3.9 beta in my stock, and it's much like the v3.7/3.07 release.
Ignoring any labels on ROMs, most of the 3.x series have the AT interface code for the AT interface on the A30xx sandwich accelerator boards burned higher in the 27C256 ROM/EPROM. Some FastROM 4.0 labels are actually v3.3 AT and v3.15 SCSI code on them. The first gvpscsi.device release was 4.5 on the newer G-Force PGA-chip 68030 accelerators and the 68040 board for the A2000. Lost from the code was Series I controller support, and the AT code in a seperate area of the ROM was dropped from the image. SCSI-level code was not modified from the later 3.x series. I know the Supra 28Mhz accelerator had the same issue as the AdSpeed, so they revamped the kludge control tool option as 68KCache, and the DMA-tranfer size limiter tool can be pointed at any .device in the system, and activates when the device is in an open state. I think there are v4.5, 4.12, 4.14, and 4.15 (read Ralph's explanation when it was released - though never on a produced card).