Compact Flash reader on A2000 causing strange problem

[mechy]

Hello everybody, I have a question about a Compact Flash reader I bought off a website called A4000t.com (Mechware).  It's actually a pretty nice reader, that works well but acts rather strangely.  The exact model of the reader is:  SCM PCD-50B SCSI Card reader.

I hooked it up to my SCSI cable, powered up my Amiga and configured it.  I notice that it works pretty good except that it does it following:  Every second, I see my CDROM and Flash reader LED's blink simultaneously, then the next second the Hard Drive and Flash Reader led's blink simultaneously.  This goes on non stop back and forth except when I play games.

Does anybody know whether this is normal and if not, how to stop it?  Thanks.

Barney

This is completely normal, As many stated above its polling for diskchages.
MattH hot the nail on the head here.

If it did not do this it would never know when you swapped cards/cd's etc.

Mech

[mechy]

I see this in OS 4.1 where I have an LED attached to the CSPPC board and it flashes about every second, even with SCSI CF card reader not mounted in the CSPPC scsi menu.  I haven't figured why you can't boot off the Card Reader in OS 4.1; you can in OS 3.X. The CF cards are present and can be mounted and read in OS 4.1. In the Media Toolkit you save device changes with "Inject" button as the "Save to Disk" button gives an error "Can't write to sector 0."

I may be wrong here, as i never tried it under os4.1 but ave you tried to remove the rdb from the cf and try it? If you are using a cheap uw to 50 pin adapter may play a role, you should use a proper high byte adapter if possible. Purely speculation mind you , again, i have not tried it under 4.1.

[mechy]

I never had any luck booting without the pcmcia adapter. Even followed a couple of posts, just sits there after it's scanned through the luns. Has some strange quirks, but works really well with the adapter, downside is the cover of the a590 wont fit on with the adapter.

Case modding time coming up I guess.

The problem with the 2091 is there are many chip revisions on them. I tested with 2 different 2091's originally with different roms,dmacs and WD scsi chips.
The revision 4/proto scsi chips are problematic. The pcd-50B is a true scsi2 device needing parity. the revision 4 scsi chip is known to have broken scsi II command set and problems with multiple devices. That being said the 2 2091's i tried worked ok with the older revisions when i tested them,but with all this old stuff, mileage can vary i guess. They are slow cards. adding 512MB+ ram to them helps some.
Make sure you have the maxtransfer set correct.

this link may help some of you. it what i found out in testing the A590:

http://eab.abime.net/showthread.php?t=62178&highlight=a590