DENEB booting off of a thumbdrive.

[bash64]

Anyone else had success booting off of a thumbdrive?
I have with both os 3.1 and 3.9.
However, I cannot get it to happen consistantly.
Playing with various timings and delays just makes things worse and leads to strange crashing.

DENEB user.

 :-D

[amigadave]

I haven't been able to buy a Deneb card yet, but plan to at AmiWest if I can afford it.

It will be great to boot into different OSes from a thumbdrive.  I hope you can figure out what is causing the inconsistent behavior and correct it with the help of other Deneb owners and perhaps the creator of the card.

[MozzerFan]

I also own a deneb, and I have successfully booted from a usb thumb drive and a sd card. I didn't have to do anything special. I just put all poseidon related things in the flashrom and partitioned and formatted the drives with SFS.
Works like a charm. I didn't have to change anything in the settings.

Regards,
Lloyd

[bash64]

Crap.
Why then am I having so many issues?

A2000 (brand new condition) rev 6.2
A2630 w 4mb
dkb A2632 w 96mb
dkb megachip plus w 2mb
gvp hc+8 w 2mb and 4gb hard drive
gvp spectrum video card
deneb usb 2.0
usb burner with lightscribe
usb netgear ethernet
usb 5.1 audio
usb sata 160gb drive
usb wireless keyboard and mouse logitech

What are your specs?

Sincerely, Being driven nuts by boot issues with Deneb.
 :pissed:

[mike-]

Has anyone managed to boot off it?

[MozzerFan]

What are your specs?

A4000 Desktop, Cyberstorm mkII 060/50, Picasso IV, concierto, paloma, IDE CDRW, IDE 40 GB HD connected to cyberscsi with Acard SCSI-IDE adapter, X-Surf 2, Sitecom usb cardreader.

What exactly are your issues when booting from a thumbdrive?

Regards,
Lloyd

[MozzerFan]

Has anyone managed to boot off it?

Read my previous post ?

Regards,
Lloyd

[mike-]

Ops i read using my blind eye

[bash64]

Basically inconsistency.
What I found out the one time I got it to work was that the thumbdrive had to be the ONLY usb device plugged in.
Adding additional usb devices caused additional delays and the boot failed and I got the floppy screen.

My goal is to use it to replace my aging scsi system.
Do you know how hard it is to find a 4gb or smaller drive that is not ragged out? I bought a box of four of them on ebay. I'm down to two working ones. I need a NEW reliable set of drives to use.

I'm now wondering if my gvp hc+8 is the issue. Maybe the commodore 2630 accelerator doesn't like it. I just don't know.

Perhaps my el cheapo 1gb thumbdrive is a piece of !@$!@$ or just too slow to respond.
I plan on backing up my nice 8gb thumb and trying to use it.

Tell me what steps you went through to setup your deneb.
I used the quick poseidon option inside the luciferin menu to load up the modules and then flashed and cleared the tags.
Later I tried running the psdromtag utility also.

I'm terribly afraid that if I unplug everything again it will work which just won't do. My internal ide burner is hooked up to the internal usb port and I am NOT giving that up.

I do have os 3.9 on cd and os 3.1 floppies with AsimWare.

Sincerely, Roger.
 :-?

[mike-]

Hm, could be that the dongle just needs a good formating again? They have a tendency to sod up from time to time. You have the latest SFS i presume?

[MozzerFan]

Tell me what steps you went through to setup your deneb.

I installed the deneb card and booted my system in rescue mode. Then I installed poseidon and luciferin. I then powered off the system and removed the rescue mode jumper and powered on. I set up the correct deneb driver in trident (in my case the dma driver), clicked the online button and saved my settings. Then I started luciferin, cleared the flashrom, and flashed it again with the related poseidon files (using the quick poseidon menu option from luciferin). [EDIT: forgot to mention that I removed psdstackloader from user-startup]. I partitioned and formatted the thumb drive with SFS, copied some system files to it, and rebooted my system from the thumbdrive. Like I already said, it worked like a charm.

What I found out the one time I got it to work was that the thumbdrive had to be the ONLY usb device plugged in.

It sounds like a power problem to me. Are you connecting the thumb drive to a self-powered hub? I do.
Are you using the Z2 deneb device driver?
Also what you could try is to remove some expansion cards
and see if it makes a difference.

Regards,
Lloyd

[bash64]

My hub is not self powered.
It is a Targus laptop hub.
I don't like to use it because Trident says it has a GenSys chip (?) and is not reliable. So I don't use it except for keyboard and mouse testing and then it works fine.
It can take power but did not come with a power supply.

I have my thumb plugged directly into the deneb external port.
That should be good. right?
I have removed as many cards as I can.
I could remove the video card and microway flicker fixer and hook it up to an analog monitor.

 :-(

[Matt_H]

You're running a lot of USB devices and the Deneb is probably strained for power. Try a powered hub - common and cheap.

[bash64]

Just bought one.

Spent all night and this morning reformatting.

Pulled out the deneb and I'm still having issues powering up.

I've only seen one part go bad in any computer over the years that can cause this much odd trouble...the hard drive controller.

I think my gvp hc+8 is flaky.

I am replacing with a a2091.

[MozzerFan]

Hi Bash, just remembered something important. Firmware v7 of the deneb comes with a watchdog. This means when in a short amount of time to many reboots are taking place, the deneb flashrom will be deactivated. If you have v7 and you try to boot from thumbdrive, wait about 10 seconds before rebooting. Otherwise the deneb flashrom is deactivated and poseidon will not be started, so the system can't boot from your thumbdrive. The new firmware on the E3B website doesn't have the watchdog thing anymore, so if you're uncomfortable with the watchdog thing, you can reflash the deneb with the new firmware.

Also check your PSU. You have many expansions in your A2000 (lucky you). Maybe your PSU isn't providing enough juice.

Regards,
Lloyd