WHDLoad suddenly broken

[TheRogue]

Hi there guys. So I'm having a problem with WHDLoad. The setup I am running on is as follows:

A4000D in Mirage 4000 Pro tower w/ 2MB ChipRAM
CyberStormPPC 060-50/604e-200 with 128MB FastRAM
CyberVisionPPC
256MB ZorRAM
Elbox FastATA4000 with 80GB Hard disk
2GB System hard disk and CD-RW on onboard IDE controller
Deneb USB
X-Surf 3cc using the Genesis stack
Delfina flipper on X-Surf clockport #1
OS 3.9 BB2, WarpOS 5.1, PowerUP emulation, Warp3D 4.2, CyberGraphX 4
WHDLoad 16.9 registered

WHDLoad was working fine a week ago, but now when I try to run any  WHDLoad software that preloads the system will hang at the WHDLoad intro  screen, and if I run any WHDLoad software without preload the intro  screen will disappear and the system will hang at a black screen. I am  thinking perhaps some of my SIMMs on the CyberStorm have been damaged as  we've had a heatwave here recently and I left my system on for several  hours the other day with the case open by accident. Please let me know  what I should do. Thanks so much.

[Franko]

Have you noticed anything else not working properly, or is it just WHDLoad...

[TheRogue]

I haven't noticed anything unusual except for the WHDLoad issue. I tried a memtest which gave me way too many errors to allow a system to function, so I am guessing the program was incompatible with my setup. If someone can recommend a memtest that is known good with my system, that would be a good first step I suppose.

[Franko]

Can't think of any memtest progs offhand right now, but an easy way to check the fast ram is to (if you have some), copy lots of lzx or lha archived files onto the ram: disk and then test each one, even one bit of bad memory should cause an error to show during the test, bit time consuming I know, but it does work.

Also noticed that you said you had left the case open recently, first thing I would do is open it up again and check all connection and socketed chip, just in case the heat has caused some movement.

Snoopdos is quite good for tracking down some of these WHDLoad problems also.

[amiga1260]

try to turn off the Genesis TCP/IP stack. When this is runnnig, then the WHDLoad won't work.

[Franko]

Aminet's a good source for memcheck progs, here a quick link to some of them...

http://aminet.net/search?query=memcheck

[TheRogue]

Just ran the memtest in the MemCheckBH.lha archive on AmiNet. The results look good. Since I have 128MB on the CyberStorm and 256 on the ZorRAM in addition to the 2MB chip it tests 3 segments:

08000020-0FF7FFFF (Roughly 128MB) - No Errors
40000020-4FFFFFFF (Roughly 256MB) - No Errors
00004020-001FFFFF Chip RAM - No Errors

So I suppose that the RAM is not the culprit. I guess I can try re-seating all the chips and see where that takes me.

[Franko]

Look's like the mems ok. So I don't think you need to do the re-seating yet, I would run snoopdos end let it write a log file so that you can see at which point WHDload is failing.

[TheRogue]

The problem was not with WHDLoad at all but rather with my FastATA it seems. Once I ran a WHDLoad program from my system drive rather than from the FastATA work drive things worked ok. It seems nothing wants to run from that drive. What could the problem be? I have the drive formatted as one 80GB partition, but I was under the understanding that FFS in OS3.9 could handle large work partitions. Do I need to patch/get a new version of FFS?

[Franko]

The problem was not with WHDLoad at all but rather with my FastATA it seems. Once I ran a WHDLoad program from my system drive rather than from the FastATA work drive things worked ok. It seems nothing wants to run from that drive. What could the problem be? I have the drive formatted as one 80GB partition, but I was under the understanding that FFS in OS3.9 could handle large work partitions. Do I need to patch/get a new version of FFS?

No FFS can only handle partition sizes of just under 4GB with FASTATA. You need a file system like SmartFileSystem (the one I use), with SmartFilesystem I have varous sized partitons on my 2 500GB HDs and FASTATA, the biggest of which is 250GB, but there is no real limit on partition sizes using SFS and I have never lost even one bit of data in the years that I have been using it.

[TheRogue]

Ok, that explains a lot then. How do I go about installing SFS and having my drive be formatted in that instead of FFS?

[Franko]

First thing, if you don't already have SFS you can download it from Aminet here...

http://aminet.net/package/disk/misc/SFS

It's not really possible to explain here just how to set it up, but the docs included with it explain quite clearly just how to install SFS and set it up.

Only thing I would say is make sure the first partition you create is a FFS system partition, cos if you want to be able to boot from this HD then due to the way the Amigas OS works and the way that FASTATA works you really need a FFS partition of no more than 4GB as the first partition in order to be able to boot up from that disk.

There are two types of filesystems you can use with SmartFileSystem, SFS0 & SFS2, I would recommend you use SFS2 as there is no size limit to an individual file with SFS2 whereas SFS0 if limited to just under 4GB per individual file (a bit like FAT32).

Read the docs carefully before you attempt to install and partition you HD. It might look a bit complicated at first but it's really quite simple once you get the hang of it, and it's certainly worthwhile in my experience, no more file size limits and easy to store DVD images on like I do.

Cheers :drink:

Franko

[TheRogue]

Thanks for all your help! I really appreciate it! I sent you a PM just now as well.

[Franko]

Got your PM, sent a quick reply back...

[lauri.lotvonen]

Did you have your Deneb USB installed when the WHDLoad was working?
Poseidon crashes almost every WHDLoad game that I know of.
Try turning Poseidon USB stack off.