GVP Binddrivers Causes Black Screen

[madgrizzle]

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

[madgrizzle]

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?

[madgrizzle]

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

[madgrizzle]

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.

[madgrizzle]

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.

[madgrizzle]

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?

[madgrizzle]

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?

[madgrizzle]

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

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.

[madgrizzle]

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.

[madgrizzle]

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.

[madgrizzle]

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.