GVP HC+8 Problems - very odd!

[iMacMiga]

I recently got a 4000 and installed a GVP 2000 HC+8 SCSi card almost as soon as I got it (the IDE sucks - it's only good for CD drives). At the time it was running as an open chassis for testing and regular strip downs. I started out with the stock 4000, then I added the SCSI, then a 3640, then a pair of 3.1 ROMs, then an Adriene I card etc. - saw no need for the lid!! Anyway, I put it all together an d shut it in it's box. It worked fine but one of the two SCSI drives was getting too hot for my liking, so I decided to take it out. Big mistake, now it won't boot!

Here's what the SCSI used t obe set up with:

GVP 2000 HC+8 ====== HP 1GB 50-pin HDD ====== Quantum Atlas V 68-pin via adapter

Booted fine **from the HP 1GB drive**, both drives worked A-okay.

I removed the Atlas V 68-pin disc and it stopped working. Won't boot. doesn't recognise the remaining HP 1GB Hard Disk. Fine I thought - must be the termination - tried all combinations of the termination links and no use. I even disabled the termination o nthe drive and used a cable-end 50-pin terminator (wonderful things if you use 68-pin drives on 650-pin buses) but that didn't work.
Still it doesn't boot. I've tried Auto-Start on the spindle, that didn't make a difference, tried 4 different SCSI IDs, nope. I was out of ideas. If I look in the early-boot screen the drive is not even in 'boot options' the list - it only displays DF0.

I tried a different drive and booted from a 3.1 floppy. Not recorgnised either.

I decided to see if re-attaching the 68-pin Quantum would work - and yes it booted fine from the HP drive again.
Note - no boot files are even installed on the 68-pin Quantum drive - it doesn't even have any bootable flags on the RDB.

It's got me foxed. I've been working with SCSI for years and this is totally out of the ordinary. Only response I get from the drive or the card is if I let it start up from cold to the 'insert floppy' screen then Ctrl-A-A it it flashes the Hard Disk's LED about 6 times at 2 second interval then drops back to the 'insert floppy' screen. I think the card is trying to tell me something is wrong with the setup. Damn knows what though. Only GVP manual I found was in German. Not much good - I did do German at school but my basic understanding isn't enough really and Babelfish is no good for technical docs either.

Anyone fallen over this or similar. It's complicated, unusual, weird and above all DAMNED ANNOYING! I just flicked out £40 for a set of 3.1 ROMs. It's galling to not be able to use the machine in my ideal setup

[Argus]

Why not just ditch the HP drive and stick with the Atlas?  It's probably faster too.  Perhaps the HP drive's termination is not compatible with the passive termination on the GVP card.  Some SCSI drives are better than others for compatibility.  You could try a different scsi ID # for the HP drive and see if that works.

[patrik]

@iMacMiga:

Not to be an arse, but the HC+8 will actually even perform a bit worse than the onboard IDE-controller in an A4000.

The A4000 IDE-controller can reach above 3MB/Sec with a modern harddrive and a processor-card with good access to the motherboard bus and that is more than the HC+8 which manages a maximum of 2.2 - 2.4MB/Sec with a modern drive.

Then ofcourse the HC+8 is a dma controller which the IDE-controller in the A4000 aint and should thus lessen the cpuload. But as it is a Zorro2 dma controller, it wont in a Zorro3-machine be able to do dma transfers to/from the fastest memory, but only to slow chip-ram or Zorro2-fastram. This will force the cpu to work on the data in very very slow memory which removes all the advantage of a dma controller.

So my advice would be to skip the HC+8 and the SCSI-drives if they are causing trouble and just use an IDE-drive in your A4000 instead.


/Patrik

[mechy]

Hi,
  This is just a guess,but check the HP drive for a termpwr(termination power) jumper,not to be confused with the termination jumper,set it if it has one. it sounds a bit like the atlas was supplying this termination power to the buss,and when you removed it,its not got power to activate the terminator. its not uncommon on 68pin drives for this to be a problem. if this doesnt work,try using a active terminator on the end of the chain(with the HP drive unterminated),it may fix the problem.

As far as using the hcII+8 in a 4000,its a very slow,old card.with a fast modern (read 5400 or 7200rpm)ide drive,the onboard ide would match the speed or do slightly better.the zorro2 vs ide load wont bet much different.If you want fast scsi,your best bet is a warpengine,cyberstorm MK2,3 or Cyberstorm PPC with fast 68pin UWscsi.If thats out of the question,go for a FastlaneZ3 its at least z3 dma and can attain around 9M/s i think,and you can add slow fast ram too!.

mike!

[iMacMiga]

@Argus

The Atlas V is very definitely a great drive, BUT it gets way too hot to run in a standard desktop A4000. Also the only place I could mount it  was right over the top of the 040 - not great for keeping the CPU cool.

I like SCSI because it's DMA and reduces CPU load - that's good but if you say ZII DMA only works to the ChipRAM then I guess the CPU is constantly shifting stuff around and processing data in the ChipRAM, yeh it'll slow stuff down - Thanks for the heads up there - I'll drop the 12GB Maxtor ATA drive back in it I think (if I can get the damned ATA cable to reach from the CD Drive!!!).

One thing I'm reluctant to do regarding abandoning the GVP card is it's got 8MB of ZII FastRAM on it. If I take it out I'll lose that. I presume just leaving the card loitering in the machine with no drives on would be ok? Might come in useful if I need to hang a Zip drive or something on the machine too.

Thanks for your advices.

[patrik]

@iMacMiga:

Yeah, it works fine without any drives attached, just unjumper J4 to disable autoboot or else it will search for the non-existant drive(s) for quite some time each boot.

When you disable the autoboot jumper it wont load the gvpscsi.device from the rom on the HC+8 anymore so if you then want to use say a zip-drive then, just drop the "gvpscsi" device-driver from the Expansions drawer on the HC+8 drivers disk into the Expansions drawer of your Workbench partition.


/Patrik