DENEB various small issues

[Darrin]

Hi MIchael,

While you're posting in the forums, perhaps you can help me.  I bought a USB to IDE/SATA cable for attaching 2.5" and 3.5" drives and I did have it working great under OS3.1 and it would mount my old A1200 2.5" drives where they would appear as a normal disk icon and  could click on them, copy files, etc.

I've now got OS3.9 running and I've tried testing a number of 3.5" and 2.5" drives and while I can install and partition them using HDToolbox, no icon appaers for them.  FAT16 pen drives continue to work perfectly.  Any ideas?  I'm using the new v9 firmware and the v4.1 stack.

Hardware setup:
A4000/40 @ 25MHz
OS3.9 with BB2
2MB Chip RAM
16MB Fast RAM
8MB Zorro RAM
1 x HDFDD
Cybervision 64/3D using Cybergraphx 4
FastATA4000
1 x 80GB HD (Primary master SFS)
1 x CD ROM (Secondary master)
1 x 80GB HD (Secondary slave SFS)
Deneb with USB Ethernet in port 0

Any guesses would be apprecaited.  The device seems to mount and dismount correctly and is visible on HDToolbox on USBSCSI.device, I just can't get an icon.

[Darrin]

MozzerFan wrote:
@Darrin

Had the same problem as you. Are you by chance using HDToolbox? It s#?cks big time. Try using HDInsTools instead. When I partitioned my disk with this program, it showed the [drive:]uninitialized icon after reboot.

Regards,
Lloyd

Cheers, I'll give that a go.  It still doesn't explain why my old Amiga formatted FFS drives which used to pop up suddenly don't.

It may be OS3.9 or Boing Bag related as BB2 made my CGX screen modes vanish without a trace until I found a patch to update one of my libraries.

I might make an OS3.1 installation on one of the drives and see if they'll pop up on that.

[Darrin]

wawrzon wrote:
the solution to my problem was shameful easy: no installed fat95. i cant imagine how i could forget it. and poseidon clearly complains about it too! so if you want to mount pc formated drives on ur amiga-usb u have to get fat95 from the aminet, its also supplied with deneb as far i recall.

@bash64: they may be little harsh sometimes, but otherwise imagine that they are not big companies but single people supposed to support community of idiots like me, mea culpa!!

LOL. None of us like to RTFM and I'm guilty of that more than anyone.  I do wish someone would create a FAQ out of some of these threads (I know, why don't I do it as I thought of it!).  You have no excuse though as the Poseidon itstallation offers to dump the FAT95 installer into RAM: for you.  :-D  I did have to search for an NTFS filesystem though.

[Darrin]

mboehmer_e3b wrote:

And believe me, almost 90% of all customer support requests are caused by not reading the manual (which did take us also some time to create).

This creates a big and completely unnecessary overhead in support, which keeps us away from our normal business.

Maybe you can imagine that this makes us angry, sometimes - as time is a resource which cannot be replaced by money, or anything else in the world.

Michael

Oh, I completely understand and I always appreciate any help you and the reset of the team behind the Deneb (or any other device) give in these forums.

I also hope you realise that sometimes following the manual isn't quite as easy for some of us as the people behind making the manual believe.  With so many variations of hardware and software on the Amiga combining to produce some unwanted side effects then asking questions in a thread like this can be far less painful than wading through a text file for one sentence amongst a thousand.

For example, I was unaware of the conflict between the Deneb and the Cybervision 64/3D which had me banging my head agaist a wall for several hours.  Is it mentioned in the manual?  I've no idea, but I never noticed it.  I found out because I happened to catch Chris H posting some advice on the Deneb and I asked him.  He was good enought to let me know about the problem and let me know that there was beta firmware for the Deneb being worked on.  Thanks to that, I went searching the Deneb website for an update around a month later, found and installed the v9 firmware and posted a thread for others to read letting them know that it works perefectly.

Please don't stop posting advice in these threads.  I know people (including myself) need to read the manuals more, but most of us post here to quiz other users and to get step-by-step guides on making stuff work.  I've posted a guide to getting a USB Ethernet device working because I hope it will be useful to others and hopefully answer more questions than it creates.

I will agree that the tone used at times when questioning aspects of the Deneb are grossly unfair and probably make you wonder why you even bothered to market such a device, but I'm sure it's just down to excessive frustration.  I've finally got my A4000 working as I want it too, but 've lost count of how many times I had to install OS3.x from scratch.  Even now I've run two wires from the Deneb rescue jumpers to the outside of the case so that I can twist them together should my installation go tits-up again.

I know one thing though, I wouldn't give up my Deneb card for the world!   :-)

[Darrin]

amigakit wrote:
Thank you Trevor for your order- much appreciated.

FedEx have it now.

Are the Catweasle Mk4 PCI shipping yet?

[Darrin]

mboehmer_e3b wrote:

Hope the full OEM license of Poseion helps your balance here a little bit.

Michael

Personally speaking, that was the #1 selling point of the Deneb over the previous USB solutions for me.  It's a win-win situation as far as you and the consumer goes, the software is included in the hardware and goes with the hardware when it's sold so no mucking around with online registration, keyfiles or worrying whether you can get a second hand device working, plus you don't need to worry about piracy.  The auto update feature rocks too (now that my A4000 is online) and the idea of setting the jumpers so that a "drive" containing the software appears is just bliss.

[Darrin]

mboehmer_e3b wrote:

I fully agree, as you give the best example (CV643D) here.

Well, I didn't know about this issue myself unless it was reported by several people, and we needed some time to get this issue down to the CV64/3D interface. We have many test cards here, but no CV64/3D, so we had to borrow one from our customers, and after having it in the test lab connected to the logic analyzer it was a matter of one hour to trigger the problem, analyse it and fix it in the firmware of DENEB.

So we stumbled across some old bug in the CV64/3D which only occurs during certain data transfers, and only in certain situations.

I'm really glad you fixed that bug so quickly.  I had actually resigned myself to just using AGA as I had decided that USB was more useful than RTG.  It would also have been easy to say, "Well, it's the CV64/3D that's at fault" and just ignored it so I think you deserve a gold star for service and support for addressing the bug and fixing it.

Luckily I decided early in the development phase to switch from a CPLD to a much more versatile FPGA device, which easily supports upgrading the firmware by simply reflashing some FlashROM - by this decision we are flexible enough to provide hotfixes in such cases without sending in the cards, changing CPLD chips or other cost and time intensive actions.

And that's another bonus.  The upgrade to v8 and/or v9 is quick and painless AS LONG AS THE USER READS THE INSTRUCTIONS.