Amiga 4000T not booting

[Kristian95]

hehehe ok, I guess it doesn't make things easier for me that my A4000t takes a loooong time to boot... it hangs for a long time before even beginning the booting sequence, my guess is it waits at least 30 seconds I wonder what I can do to eliminate that.
Currently I use the A4000t IDE for my CF disk, I guess if I used the CSPPC SCSI it would boot faster ??

[MozzerFan]

KS 3.0 and later have a boot delay to check for IDE devices
I think the boot delay may be the culprit. I use scsi
myself and have nothing attached to the IDE connector.
To solve the boot delay problem I use a blizkick module
called NOIDE. This disables the onboard ide and cuts down
boot-time as soon as blizkick kicks in. this means that
on a cold boot i get the 30 sec delay, and after that
with each reboot i get no more delay.
For testing purposes i disabled blizkick and tried
accessing the piv bootmenu. Try waiting for like 20 secs
and then start pumping your shift keys like a madman.
Keep on doing this for another 15 seconds.
That worked for me.

Regards,
Lloyd

[Kristian95]

Cool, thanks, I'll give that a try
Btw, do you know how I can get Blizkick modules working in an eFlash card ??

[MozzerFan]

Sorry, I don't have an eflash. I really don't know.
Maybe someone here on the forum owns one and can help
you out. Also I should let you know there also is a
hardware solution for the delay problem.
IDE-Killer

Regards,
Lloyd

[Kristian95]

I've seen those, and once, when / if I run my CF cards by the CSPPC I'll probably get one of those
Meanwhile, I tried again, using your timer as a guide and again with no success at all *sigh* I guess the boot menus for my P4 and CSPPC cards are well hidden!!

[matthey]

I have a 4000T with P5 CS MKIII (very similar to CSPPC) and a 2MB E-flash.

I use the ESC key very early in a reboot and I can hold it to bring up the accelerator boot menu. If you can get the Amiga to pause and never reboot but can't see anything then push the space bar to temporarily toggle between a 15kHz and 31 kHz display.

I have been unable to get my E-flash to work. Elbox's documentation and software support of this product is bad. Early versions of their software crashed and later versions just failed. I do run a 68060@80MHz but my Zorro bus is still 50MHz. I edited my own 40.70 ROMs with Romulus and Remus replacing the 40.70 modules with the newer ones from 3.9 as well as bug fixed modules. I applied a few modules from BlizKick like Noclick which work and use Blizkick as the first command in my startup-sequence. I had to turn MAPROM off on the CS early boot menu and add NOROMUPDATES to setpatch but it works great. It's faster with less patching. I left the ide scsi.device out of my kickstart which speeds up the boot. With a CS UltraSCSI hard drive and 2 CD ROMs on the 4000T SCSI bus I get cold boots in the 15-25 second range and warm boots in about 1/2 that.

[Kristian95]

I managed to make the boot sequence halt using the Esc key, but I got no image, well there was one! grey line in the top of the screen and the monitor reported running at 31.7 kHz, I did this before knowing the space bar thing, I wonder whether pressing space will help there?

EDIT: I am way too much of a noob to try making my own kick-roms... I wouldn't even know where to start on that one

EDIT2: I now managed to get the early boot menu Now I try figuring out what ID my SCSI CD-ROM drive has... there are 4 jumpers : : : : and no. 2 is closed ( : I : : ) I figured that would make it SCSI unit 1 or 2 but no dice when I set it up like that in the CSPPC menu... at least if I only have to do stuff in the SCSI menu, I honestly don't know

[Kristian95]

Ok figured things out and have the CD-ROM drive working *yay*
It doesn't read my OS 3.9 cd though... it read my eFlash one and a random audio cd too.... but no icon for the audio cd nor for the OS 3.9 cd (I suspect it is treated as an audio cd ??)
How can I make my OS 3.9 cd accessible from OS 3.9 on my miggy and how can I set up icons for audio cd's ??

[sniken]

good too see you got your csppc menu up. care to share what you needed to do?

did you get any p-iv menu up as well in the end?

[matthey]

*yay* ;-)

I guess switching the boot menu to 15 kHz made it visible? I hope you saved the 15kHz mode bootmenu so you don't have to use the space bar every time.

I guess you're using the built in CSPPC CD driver. This is a very basic driver and doesn't support some things although it allows booting. Most people don't use the built in driver and use a mountlist in Devs:DOSDrivers using CacheCDFS which is included with 3.9. You may already have a CD0 entry in SYS:Storage/DOSDrivers you can drag over to Devs:DOSDrivers. You will need to change the tooltypes to...

DEVICE=cybppc.device
UNIT=your CD-ROM's scsi address
ACTIVATE=1

You wont be able to boot from CD but this usually isn't used on an Amiga.

[Kristian95]

ah thanks for the tooltype help I'll get right on that
Btw, there is a CDFS menu item in the CSPPC menu, would I be able to alter the things I'd do in the tooltypes part in WB ??

[Kristian95]

@sniken

Sure, what I needed to do was first to flash the ROM of my CSPPC card to the newest version (4.71) to have a boot menu at all. Then, when booting I pressed the Esc key to get the boot to stop, I then had a black screen with a single white line on top, I then pressed the space bar to change from 31 kHz to 15 kHz display of the boot menu and voila, there it was

I haven't been able to access the PIV menu at all yet, and I think it may be due to it having way old ROM version, but some people say it should have a boot menu regardless... we'll see how that one plays out as I have tried flashing the ROM to v 7.4 but the program stalled (I even tried twice) prior to flashing the ROM with the floppy light on without any response from the floppy or computer.

[MozzerFan]

Just read the docs for my paloma addon for the piv.
It came with firmware 7.4 where the boot menu was
introduced. So I guess I was wrong, sorry about that  :-D
So if you have piv firmware prior to 7.4, *edit: and you
want to use the boot menu *, you must flash you piv with
the latest firmware. Boot without startup-sequence and
setpatch and run p4update. The program returns some info
when the update is finished.

Regards,
Lloyd

[Kristian95]

I have tried flashing the PIV ROM several times, both with v 7.4 and (when 7.4 stalled) 7.1

It writes:

Board #1 at $42000000

then nothing happens.... anyone know how long the flash procedure should take ?? Flashing the CSPPC took less than 30 seconds and at no time did it make me feel it had stalled.

[Kristian95]

I just added this to my CD0 tooltype:

DEVICE=cybppc.device
UNIT=2
ACTIVATE=1

It still does not read my AmigaOS 3.9 cd what else could be wrong ??

[MozzerFan]

I don't remember how long it takes. The docs say
p4update should give a message when the update has
finished. I strongly advise you NOT to interrupt
the update process.

Regards,
Lloyd