My very unstable amiga

[Gav]

Hi
Ok this amiga of mine is really starting to annoy me because i really have no idea why any of this is happening and i'm now really fed up.

So after god knows how many various problems in the past,just a few month back my amiga boot partition decided to die on me after a crash.
I got a message upon boot up about how "HD0" was not a dos disk or some crap like that.

So i eventually got it sorted again after i installed os3.9 again on a diffrent hard drive.So now my machine had two hard drives installed.
So after i had various problems with programs such as AHI,warp 3d and warpup my amiga was now running again.
I think i had just got it sorted about last week,anyways i just switched my amiga on and i must of been using for five minutes before it locked up while using ibrowse on ebay.

So i reset the amiga and oh guess what?Yeah thats right the piece of crap decided to once again screw up my boot partition and so i got the same old stupid message.

Now this is annoying the hell out of me because i'm sick and tired of trying to make it work considering i have hardly had any use out of it since i bought the ppc card.

So much has went wrong with it that i'm almost tempted to just sell it up on ebay..

[Tomas]

@gav
Just replace the hard drive.. No amount of reinstalls is going to solve this problem if it is dying, which it certainly sounds like it is.

[Gav]

No,if you read again i said i installed OS3.9 on another hard drive,there is two drives in my amiga and this has happend to both of them.

[AmigaMance]

 Are you sure that an updated scsi.device is initiated? Type: version scsi.device full  on a cli window to check this.
 
Edit: I just saw that you are using scsi drives. I don't know if this is still a good advice for scsi drives. Never used one.
 
 You say that the partition becomes corrupted after a crash. What FS are you using? If you are using FFS it worth to try SFS/PFS, although the selection of a FS won't cure this type of stability problems...  Perhaps it will only stop corrupting your partition.

[QuarX]

See this:

http://www.amiga.org/forums/showthread.php?t=24976

I hope can help you. :-)

Ciaa  

[Gav]

Both of my drives are ide.

[Tenacious]

Where is iBrowse installed?  To what partition does iBrowse cache all files that come from the web?

There are many philosophies for organizing partitions, some can do much to prevent corruption.  The file sysytem you choose is important, too

After suffering the symptoms you describe several times, I assigned all temporary file caches to a cache directory on the ram disk (I have plenty of ram, so do you).  With an empty ram disk, pages come up a little slower the first time but repeats come up very fast.  Also, my partitions are no longer congested and fragmented with a trillion obsolete net files.  

I have 2 drives: the main and a backup.  Yam gets it's own partition because of it's nature.  There are also partitions for SYS:, APPS: MyFiles:, CDimage:, & SemiTemp:.  I have no WORK: partition (nor an assign to one) to give me better control when installing new software.

This has worked flawlessly for me now for years.  I still use PFS 2.  Just my 2 cents.

BTW: some file systems make it harder to recover a single corrupted partition on a drive that has more than one.  PFS 2 has required me to re-format all partitions on a drive because one became corrupted by temporary net files.

It is my belief that some hard drives are so hopelessly corrupted that they appear to have failed.  Same result, but steps can be taken to prevent corruption.

[PPC]

It could also be that you have a faulty IDE converter or controller.
Check also at what speed your memory is running on the blizz ppc, set it to 70ns if it is on 60ns, this causes a lot of problems some times.
I just fixed an A1200 PPC (040/25+603e 210Mhz) by setting the memory from 60ns to 70ns, the machine was HIGHLY unstable because of this, now it runs perfectly fine.
Just to be sure replace the your IDE cable too.

And if you use FFS install SFS, much more stable then FFS.
Allso check your filesystem settings (max transfer, mask etc)

And IF you still are going to sell it, sell me the blizz ppc with 060 :-D

[iMacMiga]

1200 towers have this weird Voodoo curse on them I think. I tried *everything* (and I mean *everything*) with my Mediator 1200 tower and lost my rag and sold it in the end. Perhaps something to do with having a solid-as-a-rock 060 A4k desktop, maybe I had everything from corrupt partitions to random gurus on boot, and when running software, and I tried everything in the book. I even booted the same hard drive on a 4000 and got non of the issues. I just don't think 1200s like being stuffed in a tower with all that extra hardware bolted on. I never *ever* have any issues with my 1200D/1230IV machine - it's as solid as my 4000D.

Anyway... Things to try...

I notice you are using a Powerflyer IDE controller. Have you tried removing it and using the internal IDE? I know removing the Powerflyer is a major op but it's the only way to eliminate it.

You could try using SFS filing system for the disk instead of FFS. I've found it way more reliable. However even this won't help you if you have a hardware issue.

Try pointing the IBrowse cache at RAM:, or even turn it off altogether. Even though they have reported them as fixed, some people still seem to think IBrowse has a tendency to damage the disk partition it's caching to. I don't know if it's true, and since 2.3 I've never had any issue with it myself, but my main machines all use SFS, which might be the key.

It does sound like a hardware problem to me though. Do you have anything on the clockport? I know that can screw with the IDE badly on some 1200 motherboards, but equally I've had no issues at all on others. They are on the same part of the bus.

Just out of curiosity also do you know your motherboard revision? It's not an evil v.1D4 is it?

[Gav]

Hi
Thanks for all the replies,yes my motherboard is the 1D4 revision although some people claim to have had no bother with this board something is definitly wrong.

No i have no current expansion on my clock port,is there anyway to actually fix a corrupt partition other than formatting it again and copying to OS to it?Such a task.

I really am starting to believe the 1200 is a bit of a nightmare in certain configs because there is times my amiga wont boot unless i move the tower slightly.

This is obviously something to do with the way the PPC card just stands vertical in the tower.
I also had a similar problem with my blizzard 1260 on a diffrent motherboard where it would not boot if the card was on a certain angle.

[iMacMiga]

Sounds to me like one issue you have is your edge connector on your 1200 or Mediator might need cleaning. Then again I had that problem with my 1200T as well, and mine was fine, it worked great when I laid the tower down on the bench!

The only 1200T I've ever had that worked at all was the original Eyetech tower (the huge one), and that used the lower half of the 1200D mounted in the side to hold everything in place.

I've had very patchy luck with 1D4s. Some stuff works - other stuff fails catastrophically. They got a bad rap from not working with some accelerators I believe.

A really good tactic is to use this partition map:

50MB - Workbench:
70MB - Work:
50MB - Backup:

Make a backup of your working WB partition every so often, that what you can restore it a lot more easily. If you have a WB 3.1 install disk you can use HDToolbox to flag your Backup: partition as Bootable also so it will work as an emergency boot, but DON'T  do anything that screwed up the other one!
Also your work files won't get chewed up if the WB partition is screwed up. Only recovery I know for a corrupt partition is Dave Haynie's DiskSalv app. AFAIK that isn't freeware as yet, and I am unsure how to get a legit copy. Also it's not really any use unless you have to get the files back - if you want to restore the WB and add-ons then you are better off installing from scratch I'm afraid

[TjLaZer]

Sounds like you need to dismantle your FrankenAmiga and start from scratch to isolate your hardware problem.  Too many upgrades and add-ons--hard to isolate the problem I am afraid.

[Boot_WB]

@iMacMiga

Agreed, the towere itself can be most important. Check out this thread to read through some of the trouble (seemingly random) I was having, only to realise that the tower was ever-so-slightly out of shape, causing the motherboard to bend, and resulting in weird errors.

@OP - from this experience, I would definitely check that your tower is not bent out of shape (look along each edge to make sure the tower is square).

Good luck, I hope you manage to solve your problems.

[rkauer]

 I got this very same problem too.

 I've bought a second-hand Mediator, but the pass-trough was broked down, caused by a hand-made tower. I have it fixed thanks to a SMT unit and the spare contacts on the edge of the connector (the not-connected connectors:crazy:)

 My two cents: when building a tower system, look very carefully for appropriate spacers.

[Gav]

Hi
Well today i thought i would try and sort out my amiga again since i had one bootable partition left which was running OS3.9 but without all my mediator drivers and what not.

So obviously i had to mount my cd drive but i forgot i never had the powerflyer software installed.
So i installed the fast-ata software and reset the amiga and upon booting up i could not click on anything so i reset again and the machine locked up.
So i switched the power off for a few mins and tried again and oh,surprise surprise that same old message about Hd1 not being a dos disk.

So now i'm back at square one again with no clue why this is happening since this is now the 3rd time it has happend in such a short space.
Makes me wonder if it's the powerflyer causing this.