Amiga 4000T boot problem

[HammerD]

I have a 3 week old Amiga 4000T (Escom model) purchased from Software hut that is having trouble booting.  It is a stock A4000T/040.  I have just added an IDE hard disk and IDE CDROM, and bumped the ram up to 18MB (2+16).

When I power on the A4000T the power LED flickers about 4 times bright then light, then I get a black screen with a red box "SOFTWARE ERROR", - the red box flashes.  I then click the left mouse button and then the machine proceeds to boot normally into OS 3.9.  There is a C= 2065 ethernet card also in the machine (which works with Genesi), and otherwise there are no problems with the machine when I am using the Workbench.  All the ram is identified, I can see the CDROM and hard drive...everything works.

Only when I power it on from cold start do I get the problem.  Anyone have any ideas?

Thanks!

[X-ray]

Does this business with the software failure happen even if you don't have the hard disk connected? If you take all the IDE stuff out, does this happen?
Has it been playing up from day one that you had it? If not, what was the last thing you did to change the config before the error started happening?

[x56h34]

So someone finally purchased a NOS A4000T from software hut. :-)

Could it be that the machine needs to warm up in order to work fine? Or perhaps only a single component, such as the A3640 card.

[Markus_Bieler]

It could be an empty battery.

 

[X-ray]

@ Markus

When the battery on my A4KT went flat, I got no software failure. IIRC I ran the machine without the battery for a few days while looking for a replacement, and I got no software failure. I doubt this is a battery problem.

[HammerD]

@X-Ray

I will take out the ide disk and let you know if I still get the crash....what if I don't ? ?

[HammerD]

@All:

Ok, I did some more testing, and the A4000T only gets that problem when my 20 gig IDE hard disk is plugged into the machine via the IDE cable...is my hard drive incompatible??

I tried both 80-pin and 40-pin IDE cables (no difference)... or is there some jumper I can adjust somewhere?  The hard disk is a Maxtor 541DX 5400 rpm 20 gig drive.

[HammerD]

@Me

Ok I take that back. I have tried 3 hard drives now and all get the "Software Failure" red rectangle...

Hooking up just a CDROM drive as a master device (only device) on the cable was ok, no problem, and of course taking off the IDE cable it boots up to a purple "insert disk" screen...

[DethKnight]

Having SIMILAR problem here on my A3000

but witha replacement SCSI disk

When I cold-reboot, I get the purple insert-disk screen

from there a warm reboot works fine

(no guru meditations or software errors here)

still researching, have only come up with something about using an RDB software tool to set HiID Flag to ON
sometimes called LastDrive or HighDrive

havent tried that yet

[orange]

Hmm, maybe its related to  slow_spinup problem?
What KS do you have?

[X-ray]

@ Orange

If it is an A4000T he'll have the latest ROMs.

@ HammerD

I was going to suggest that it is a long spinup time on your drive, but if you've tried 3 drives, then I don't know. (unless they are all old drives)
Do you have any SCSI drives that you can test?

Edit: did this crash start happening from day one that you had the machine?

[Castellen]

My Amiga Technologies A4000T has always done exactly the same thing.
Like you found, it only does it when there are IDE devices present.

Doesn't worry me much as the computer runs 24/7.

Never really looked into the problem in detail, but it appears to be some kind of timing issue as it accesses IDE devices during boot.
Changing SCSI spinup time or whatever doesn't fix it either.  You'll be running OS version 40.70 which is OS 3.1 with the A4000T SCSI controller software and without workbench.library.
Possibly the way to fix it properly would be to edit the code in ROM to change how things are done during boot, but that's not so easy without a copy of the source code handy :-P

[HammerD]

I guess it has pretty much happened from day 1.  If I put my cyberstorm 060 with a scsi disk in the machine the problem doesn't happen.

It ONLY happens when an IDE disk is attached to the onboard ide connector...an IDE CDROM is fine.

Weird...

[HammerD]

Hmm, interesting that yours does the same thing...I guess there is nothing really that can be done.  I mean the machine works fine, I just get that error but it eventually boots without any intervention.

Or I could just use scsi...

[darkcoder]

Hello

 I also experience this problem, but not with all IDE devices.
Usually, my A4000T only works with SCSI disks, but from time to time I connect some IDE disk, mainly to do backups of IDE disks I use with my other Amigas.
With an old IDE disk (Matrox) I have the same guru meditation, $0000000B if I remember right. And then it boots and work nicely.
however recently I connected a Nec 3520 DVD writer and used it for more than a month, and the IDE-boot-guru never appeared.

I also have a Cyberstorm mk3 as CPU board. It would be interesting to see whether it depends on the CPU board (having  onboard SCSI).