VERY Slow boot, with GVP SCSI Sidecar

[Tchucolate]

Hey, I have installed a GVP HD8+ SCSI hard disk controller with my (1MB Chip) Amiga500. The GVP unit has 8mb of Fast RAM installed, and is using a ZuluSCSI as the drive.

I know SCSI 1 and an 68000 are not super fast, but with this device and a ZuluSCSI, it takes 2 minutes to boot into OS 3.2!

Is this normal? An issue with OS 3.2 maybe, is this in any way bloaty? Aimed more at a 68020+ machine?

I have watched a BlueSCSI on the same controller, and it literally appears to do NOTHING for the first minute of the boot. There is a flutter of HD activity when switched on, then nothing. Then around the 1 minute mark it springs into life and starts booting. Roughly 20 seconds before it boots it seems to stop again, waits for 15 seconds and then a small 5 second flurry and Workbench appears.

Anyone with any good tips as to how to configure this machine better?

Any help appreciated

[alexh]

I had the same setup. Albeit KS3.1 (40.63) and AmigaOS3.1 think there's a small waiting time programmed into the ROM to wait for HDD to spin up. Booting was very fast. 10sec max

I'd say there must be something wrong. Either with your ZuluSCSI or AmigaOS installation.

Try using the early boot menu to select booting with no startup sequence?

[Tchucolate]

Something wrong, indeed, its quite painfull. I now have other Amiga ROMS, so I can if I wish try running 2.04 on it, and see how that fairs. Im not sure if running 3.2 on a stock A500 is a good idea...?

[Jope]

If you have around 4MB of Fast RAM or more, 3.2 is quite fine and usable.

I doubt changing the kickstart will make much of a difference, if the time is spent in the GVP's scsi driver waiting for the hard disk to show up.

It's a bit difficult to know what is going on here, perhaps try with one single small disk image at first and only make one partition on there that is formatted. You should have the machine booting to the initial cli rather quickly.

[patrik]

How large partitions do you have? Anything 1GB and up will take a noticeable time to mount with FFS on a 68000.

You can see how much time is spent in mounting by using the early startup menu. Hold both mouse buttons at reboot, then press the “boot with no startup sequence” button and observe the delay until you get the promp and watch for hd activity - if the hd led now is showing a lot of activity for many second before you get the prompt, this is mount time.

[Nor Bert]

Add first command to s-s

ADDBUFFERS DH0: 256

If DH0 is boot partition

[levo-ace]

BlueSCSI does have some options that can be set in the bluescsi.ini file . If it does not exist on your card , then the options that are most common for MAC's is set and can cause complications with the AMIGA .
The file is just an editable text file , and can be created with notepad and the like .
In this file , for the amiga , you need to put

Quirks=0 ; no mac quirks
Debug=1 ; this will put a debug output file on the sd card
EnableSCSI2=0 ; This will turn SCSI 2 commands off
Type=0 ; Fixed

The options are case sensative , and Quirks=0 is definitely needed for the Amiga .

[Jope]

Once you get it working, better turn debug off. :-)

[Nobby_UK]

When I finally got BlueScsi to see 2 hardfiles
(1 @ 1Gig and 1 @ 540 Meg)
It was SLOW = around 45-50 seconds to Boot/Verify

With just one hard file it was quite fast = 5-10 secs
with WB 2.1 by the way.