GeForce 040 - sloooow SCSI? :(

[Robert17]

Hey mike,

I gauged CPU Usage by using a program called RSCP From Aminet, it measues disk speed and free CPU Use. But before that I noticed the mouse pointer was very slow whilst transferring files or formatting a partition.

Robert.

[Oldsmobile_Mike]

Well, the HC8+ arrived, I plugged in 8MB of spare memory, flipped a few jumpers around on it and on my GeForce, installed it, plugged my SCSI cable into it, flipped the switch, early startup control showed all boards working and all drive partitions detected, told it to boot... and nothing.  Black screen.  

After some more playing around with jumpers I was able to get into a "boot with no startup-sequence" mode and ran SysInfo, even with no SetPatch and half the caches disabled on my accelerator I was still getting 1,900K/sec, so this looks promising, but it seems like it's going to take quite a bit more fiddling around to get it to boot.  I can't even boot off my 3.9 Emergency floppy or a stock 3.1 Install disk, currently.  They all just blackscreen.

Or occasionally I get errors like this attached photo.  :-p  I think it's a conflict between gvpscsi.device on the accelerator and gvpscsi.device on the card.  I seem to recall seeing somewhere that it should autodetect and pick up the second one as gvpscsi2.device, but that's not happening, and no amount of swapping jumpers around has found me the correct setting yet.  May just try running the accelerator with no ROM at all, what's the worst that could happen, but it seems like with the ROM disabled I was also loosing my fastmem on the accelerator. (according to avail)  

[Oldsmobile_Mike]

Going back to the old troubleshooting process, I reset all the jumpers on my GeForce and plugged my SCSI chain back into it, exactly as I've been using it, pulled the "boot" jumper off the HC8+, and tried to boot that way.  See if my system was even stable with the HC8+ in there acting as nothing more than a RAM card.  Nope.  Got another garbled error message about something in-use.

Was able to boot with no startup and run a few commands however, and that's when I noticed that $)(%@ GVP used the same manufacturer and board # ID's for both the SCSI/RAM portion of the GeForce board as they did with the HC8+, and it appears to be some incompatibility on a base hardware level.

Anyone more experienced in this take a look at the attached two screenshots and chime in?  I can already tell it's reading them wrong based on the amount of fast memory it's showing (should be 24 MB, 16 on the GeForce and 8 on the HC8+, but it looks like it's reading the second card twice).  Crud, crud, crud.  

So if I'm understanding this correctly, it appears my plan can't work because they have identical ID's, but are not identical cards?  Then the only way to do this would be to get a different accelerator, or a different HD controller card, that don't conflict?

(disregard date on clock being wrong, I still haven't fixed my clock chip yet either, LOL)

[guest11527]

The double vendor ID is at this point nothing that troubles me so much. From the former screenshot, the one containing the y's with the dots on top, it rather seems to me that either the RAM on the board is defective, or the communications between the motherboard and the expansion card is defunct. Given that this is an A2000, this is unfortunately not as unusual as you may believe. Which motherboard revision do you happen to have?  Trouble is, the expansion bus of the A2000 is prone to miscommunication due to bad electrical termination. A popular fix for this is to add pull-ups at the bus drivers close to the CPU at the right side, but depending on your board, this may or may not have the desired effect.  Reasoning: The y-character you see there has the ASCII (actually ANSI) code 255. This can happen because either the RAM is forgetting its contents, is defect or the communication between RAM and the rest of the system creates the wrong signals and thus returns 255 where it should return the actual value.  Some combinations of expansions and A2000 generations simply cannot made to work. I had this trouble here with my A2000 for years until I finally gave up on this. Lousy design/engineering of the expansion bus is the culprit.

[Oldsmobile_Mike]

Hi Thomas,

Thanks for the followup.  It's a Rev. 6.4 motherboard, full ECS with Megachip.  System is stable with everything else installed, just when I try putting the HC8+ in there I can't boot (even off a floppy).  I've tried with and without the DTAK pullup jumper on the HC8+, and also tried removing all my other cards and putting the HC8+ in various other slots.

Interestingly when I remove the ROM from my GeForce and flip the jumpers to "no attached drive, no autoboot" I also loose the memory on my GeForce.  (seems to be more from the rom being removed than the jumper moved)

You may have a point about it being bad memory on the HC8+, although I used these chips in my A500 GVP controller successfully in the past with no issues.  Off to hunt down a memory test program, since from what I read in a thread on Amibay I should at least be able to use the HC8+ as an additional 8MB RAM board, with everything else disabled, and I'm not even able to do that currently.  :-/

[Oldsmobile_Mike]

Progress!

Reset my A2000 back to the configuration I had it working at prior to this latest phase of mucking about.  Took the HC8+ and removed all it's RAM, removed it's boot ROM, removed the autoboot jumper, wanted to see if it was functional as just a bare card... and the system booted up perfectly.  So it appears that all along issue has been with bad ram on the new card.  Thanks again, @Thomas, for pointing me in the right direction, and PS - your libraries are awesome, just installed them a few days ago, huge improvement!  

Now to take a victory break and look at re-adding components to the HC8+ one by one, starting with memory until I find the bad stick, then maybe the drives.  Later.  

[guest11527]

Be careful, though. It *may* be the RAM, but if the bridge to the motherboard is the problem, then it *may* only seem to work and problems will appear as soon as you try to attach a drive to it. You then get the phenomenon that disk I/O is *sometimes* broken, causing flipped bits and damaged files. Been there, done that. Other than that, the 6.4 motherboard should be at least a lot better than my 4.1.

[Oldsmobile_Mike]

Ha, yeah, intermittent problems are my life story.    I tried the card with 8 different 1MB simms, all of which had worked correctly in my A500 sidecar in the past, in pairs of 8, 4, and 2.  At no point with any combination of them (and with the card in different ZII slots) would it boot.  I'd get those gibberish messages like posted above, or it would freeze up.  However the card works fine with no memory installed, I was even able to use my SCSI card reader and hard drives connected to it (but for whatever reason it wouldn't see my optical drive).  The card works with no ram installed and it boots up, but is pretty slow because of the bus.  800K/sec, give-or-take.

Seems like that narrows it down to:

- either one of the first two slots on the HC8+ is bad, where the first memory sticks are required to be inserted.  This might be a possibility, and might explain why the seller immediately accepted my relatively low "make an offer" price on ebay.  :-/
- some incompatibility between ram on the HC8+ and my GeForce
- some incompatibility between ram on the HC8+ and my motherboard

No real way to test a couple of those options, if I had a spare HC8+ I could swap in, or if I had a complete other A2000 that I could try this one in...  Bah.  My quest to add a faster SCSI interface to my A2000 project will have to be continued till another day!  I should probably also test the HC8+ without my GeForce installed, just to see what happens there...