GVP HD8+ problems

[paul1981]

What happens if you cold boot and hold both mouse buttons down to get into the startup-menu?

[paul1981]

What does cold boot mean? If I hold both mouse buttons down nothing happens. The A500+ works fine when I pull the GVP HD8+ off...

I didn't know it was working with the HD removed, but a cold boot is a boot from power being off.
If it's a 500+ (kick 2) then there should be a boot menu if you hold down both mouse buttons whilst powering on (or after rebooting).
You could still attach the hard drive and see if you can get into this bootmenu.

[paul1981]

I have kickstart 3.1 and with the GVP HD8+ attached I get no boot menu when holding down both mouse buttons.

Okay...so that rules out a corrupted (software wise) hard drive. Definitely dealing with a hardware issue here (providing you attempted to go into bootmenu from powerdown). The reason I  say that is because it could have been an RDB virus... but not so I believe, if you can't even get into the bootmenu from a cold reset (maybe someone can correct me here as the RDB is read upon power on).

Can you hear the hard drive spin up? Or doesn't it get that far? (black screen and flashing caps)

[paul1981]

I checked the SCSI cable and this seems to be fine as well. Does anyone know what the hd8 tries to do after it confirms that there is a hard disk?

How did you check the cable?

[paul1981]

With a solderless breadboard + jump wires + led light + 3.7V battery. Did a small circuit with the scsi cable in the middle, tested it for each line on the cable and led light turned on each time.

Is this ok? or that was not the right way to test it? I just tried the first thing that came to mind.

That sounds okay, but even so you can never be sure. A good connection depends on good spring force on the little copper connections on the end of the cable onto the pins on the drive/adapter. Poking thick jump wires in the holes could weaken the connections further. So I'd still recommend replacing the cable just incase.
Unless you can test the cable on another computer then you can't be sure it's working correctly at all.