SCSI HDD not seen unless IDE HDD connected

[motorollin]

Well it has been fine on all partitions on the IDE disk, but I'll give FFS a try just in case.

--
moto

[amigagr]

waste of time but... it's your decision

[Thomas]

If I cold boot the system, it boots and setpatch reboots the machine, but then I just get a black screen with no HDD activity or floppy clicks.

This happens on my A4000 after a fresh OS3.9 installation, too. It boots fine when I press Ctrl-Amiga-Amiga on the black screen, though. This is fixed by installing Boinbag 1 (for me at least).

SFS on the boot partition is fine. FFS should make no difference. If SFS causes trouble on the boot partition, it causes trouble everywhere else, too. There is no difference if SFS is used on the boot partition or on any other partition.

Bye,
Thomas

[amigagr]

@Thomas: what is your opinion on sfs v2x? have you try it?

[tonyvdb]

Ok, Dumb question but you do have SFS file system files installed on the new SCSI's system (boot) partition and are using the SCSI drives HDToolbox to set up your new drive? Because if its still set up to look at the IDE drives system partition to find the SFS files it will not work.

The best thing to do is copy over all of the IDE's system partition over to the new SCSI system partition. Make sure you have the SCSI drivers installed as well on the new SCSI drive.

[amigagr]

if you install in rdb a file system (any file system) any program that need it can use it from rdb, no need to search for L: directory. the meaning of ''go to L: to load the file''
is just for the installion at the begining, i think.

[Thomas]

amije wrote:
@Thomas: what is your opinion on sfs v2x? have you try it?

I never trusted SFS and I never will, no matter which version number it has. I'd never entrust my data to a file system which is under such heavy development as SFS. I use PFS3 for years and I am very satisfied. The only advantage of SFS which PFS cannot beat is that it's free.

But I think this is not what you wanted to hear :-D

Bye,
Thomas

[amigagr]

i have no problem to buy it if it's realy the best and if i can find any site/saler where i can buy it  :-)
anything to suggest?

[motorollin]

Well here's something weird. If I boot from my OS3.9 boot floppy with just the SCSI drive attached and allow setpatch to reboot the system, then it reboots ok, and I can boot the system (well, at least I can see the early startup screen. I didn't actually try booting Workbench as I didn't have time).

This suggested to me that there was something in the ROM Update on my hard drive that my SCSI controller doesn't like. So I copied the ROM Update and NSDPatch.cfg from the floppy to the DEVS: drawer on my hard drive (the version was different before I did this) but it made no difference :-(

I'm going to try reinitialising the disk and using FFS just to take that out of the equation.

--
moto

[Thomas]

So I copied the ROM Update and NSDPatch.cfg from the floppy to the DEVS: drawer on my hard drive

Did you actually compare the files before you copied them ? Replacing the files by the same versions cannot have any effect.

Additionally, after replacing the ROM Update file you have to switch off the computer to remove the existing copy from RAM. Copying the file without activating it has no effect either.

Did you try to Ctrl-Amiga-Amiga when it hangs as I suggested above ?

Did you install Boingbag 1 or even BB 2 as I suggested above ?

I'm going to try reinitialising the disk

Aren't you getting sick of this, doing one step forth and two steps back ? Don't you think it is time to investigate systematically what is going wrong rather than this trial-and-error method ?

Bye,
Thomas

[Boot_WB]

Just to check - you don't have an absolute device reference in your startup-sequence do you?  Such as "assign sys: dh0:blah-blah.." which point to the IDE device name rather than the partition label.

Too obvious I know...

[motorollin]

Thomas wrote:

So I copied the ROM Update and NSDPatch.cfg from the floppy to the DEVS: drawer on my hard drive

Did you actually compare the files before you copied them ? Replacing the files by the same versions cannot have any effect.

Yes I did. The version on the floppy was slightly older than the version on the hard drive.

Thomas wrote:
Additionally, after replacing the ROM Update file you have to switch off the computer to remove the existing copy from RAM. Copying the file without activating it has no effect either.

I copied the file after cold booting with no startup-sequence, so setpatch had not yet loaded the ROM image.

Thomas wrote:
Did you try to Ctrl-Amiga-Amiga when it hangs as I suggested above ?

Yes. The power light dimmed then brightened, but the screen stayed black.

Thomas wrote:
Did you install Boingbag 1 or even BB 2 as I suggested above ?

They are both already installed on the hard disk (The SCSI disk contains the contents of the IDE disk which already had BB1 and BB2 installed).

Thomas wrote:

I'm going to try reinitialising the disk

Aren't you getting sick of this

Yes :roll:

Thomas wrote:
Don't you think it is time to investigate systematically what is going wrong rather than this trial-and-error method ?

I don't know enough about the problem to resolve it systematically. The only way I can troubleshoot this is to keep trying different things until something works. If you know of a better way to fix it, please let me know :-)

@Boot_WB
No there are no volume-name specific assigns. Not really relevant though, as I can't even get to the early startup screen once setpatch has run.

--
moto

[tonyvdb]

I just thought of another possibility. Do you have an active terminator on the SCSI cable? If not this can caus you greif as well.

[motorollin]

Yes there is an active terminator at the end of the chain.

--
moto

[Boot_WB]

Moto,

Have you found out the 1230scsi.device version (using shell> version 1230scsi.device) to make sure yours IS the later version which does not need to be patched using the softscsi tool you mentioned earlier in the thread?

If you have the space, why not do a basic installation of oS3.0 on another partition of the SCSI hard drive.
Since setpatch is much simpler (does it even exist with 3.0? can't remember) the amiga should boot fine straight off the scsi.
-  If it works - you know setpatch form 3.9 is patching something preventing you booting.
-  If it does not work you know that the scsi controller (or the cable) is not correct.  Since you are having problems with the CD rom aswell it may be a scsi controller problem.    
Weird that it would work with IDE connected though...

[motorollin]

Yes it is definitely 8.5 (the latest).

I did a clean install of OS3.9 on an SFS partition on the SCSI disk, without the IDE hard drive connected, and the machine now boots to OS3.9 from the SCSI disk without problems.

This is weird, as I didn't allow the machine to boot before, just booted with no startup-sequence and ran setpatch, so I don't see what the difference is. This is also a pain because I now have to get everything back the way it was  :-x

At least it works now! Thanks everyone for the replies and support.

--
moto