GVP 4.15 Roms & Large Hard drives...

[Info-Seeker]

Hey Guys,

A while back I started a thread about the GVP GuruRom and trying to get large hard drives working with it. It turned out I didn't have the newest version of the rom on the card, and when I upgraded it, everything worked out fine.

In reading a number of your suggestions here, many of you said the 4.15 gvp rom, also available from Ralf Babel's site, would allow large hard drive support on a GVP Card. Well, I finally got the GuruRom sorted and that 2000 is all up and running perfect, so I moved on to another.

In this new 2000, I have tried the 4.15 rom in both a Combo Accelerator / SCSI controller, 030/50, and the 4008 HC+8 GVP Zorro II scsi controller, with no luck. Neither card sees the 18gig drive, and refuses to boot from it. If I replace it with a small Quantum scsi drive, the Quantum boots just fine.

So I am curious if anyone has had any experience with this issue, and what you did to resolve it. I would very much like to use the 18gig SCSI drives on all my 2000s if possible. I have enough of the Roms for each box, now I just need to make them work!

Any help would be greatly appreciated!

Info-Seeker

[Zetr0]

@Info Seekers

this is quite a pickle, I am currently using 4.15 on my A500 HD+8 and my Impact Series 2 (A2000 HC8+)

Both the A500/A500+ and the A2000 rev 4.5 / 6.1 can see my 18.1GB SCSI2 HDD.

Could this be a termination or drive configuration issue???

I found that on both my cards I had to jumer the Force SE (Single Ended) for the drive to work with the SCSI Host..

Does your 18.1GB SCSI Hard disk spin up or is dormant?

[Info-Seeker]

Interesting... I am using 18gig SCSI SCA hot swaps with a SCA to 50/68 pin adapter. I will have to check and see if there is a force SE jumper on it.

I just went back to reading my GuruRom thread because I remembered some mention of the 4.15 roms in there, and someone said the max drive size is 4 gigs. I take it that is not the case, eh?

I think we need to talk Babel in to making some new GuruRoms for the community...

Thanks for the quick reply, Zetr0!

[Hewitson]

I wonder if he would be willing to release the schematics for the PCB..

[Info-Seeker]

These are the Adapters I am using.. found them on ebay for $3 each, so I picked up a dozen.. never know when something like this will come in handy...





The full size images are online if anyone wants to look more closely...

http://sophie.outlandz.net/~john/P1020563.JPG
http://sophie.outlandz.net/~john/P1020564.JPG


They work quite well, but do not offer termination or anything. I Also picked up a bunch of DVD-Ram drives to use on the Amigas as well. The DVD-Ram drives are native scsi II, and have termination on board. While they make great cd-rom drives, and can burn cd/dvds, I am still hopefull I will get the DVD-Ram functionality working on the Amiga. Even if it is just read only, I would be happy.

anyways, I was a bit disapointed the drives didn't show up at all. I actually thought 1 of my GVP HC+8 cards was bad until I dropped the smaller quantum on it and it came right up. There are no settings on Big Book Amiga for the 4008 / HC+8, just the 2000 version of the card, but luckily I found 1 in a working 2000, actually it was that 2000 with low serial # I just posted pix of in the pix section, so I replicated the settings off that card and it magically started working...

Both I and Surprised Ferret were Surprised!



Anyways, I do have some smaller drives I can use, but it would be really nice if I could get these 18gig SCA drives working on all my Amigas...

Info-Seeker

[Info-Seeker]

by the way, the drives do spin up, and the led on the bottom of the drive controller board attached to the drive, not the gvp, flickers a few times as if the scsi bus is being probed for id's or something, but then it just goes dark...

I was tricked in to thinking it might work a few times.. so was surprised ferret!

[Hewitson]

How have you got your adapter jumpered? I'm guessing it should be set to the same SCSI ID as the drive.

My adapter doesn't have any jumpers, nor does it require power.

[Info-Seeker]

yea, I have never needed jumpers on this one to work. It has to have power cuz there is no other way to get power in to the drive. Its an 80 pin sca drive, which has power across the sca bus. The adapter just separates out the scsi and power, and applies them both separately.

[rkauer]

SCA drivers doesn't have jumpers, the jumpers must be on the adaptor.

Set the adaptor to termination enabled (TE) if they are the last physical device, enable also termination power (TP), as the GVP controller does not provide it.

Remember to install an external terminator (68 or 80 pin, pending the cable you are using) as the GVP controller will not terminate the upper 16bit of data. Without an external terminator you'll need to use very short cables and use only one device in the SCSI chain for it to work.

[Info-Seeker]

while I appreciate the attempt to help, I am not sure how any of that is relevant, Rkauer. If you scroll up a bit, you can see the adapter I am using, and none of the things you are listing are on it. Also, if you read the previous posts, you would see we are using a 50 pin cable, and using a scsi dvd-ram drive to provide termination on the line.

[Jope]

Yeh, termination and term power would have to be on the drive for it to work. Some SCA drives have jumpers for these, but not all.

[Info-Seeker]

well, I just pulled some 9.1 gig Segate Cheetah drives out of an old array I have here. Still sca drives, but they have some jumpers on the bottom of the drive, including a Force SE jumper as suggested above, and nothing happens at all now, the Amiga won't even come up to the Kickstart animation, it just hangs on a black screen.

I will b trying a few more things, but I have to admit I am a bit disappointed. I can probably live with 9 gigs on the 2000, but I'm bumping up to my minimal comfortable capacity. 4gigs on an Amiga just doesn't seem right to me. I have a 4 gig drive on my Commodore 128, I have to do better on the Amiga!

[Paul_s]

Where abouts are you installing the GVP ROM on the Ferret?

I thought Ferrets were 64-bit

[Info-Seeker]

The trick is to find a ferret with a passive backplane... Those r the best ones...

Actually, the Surprised Ferret up there is named Little-Bit. She is the tiniest Ferret we have ever seen. The woman walked around the pet store with her in her pocket and had to take her home... so we got her. Then like a week later we settled on Little-Bit. She is ballsy though, use to nip me in the face... had no fear! Luckily, she grew out of it though.

I also have a White Albino named Powder, she is a sweetheart, gives lots of kisses. And a new Giant Ferret I had to take home when I saw him named Buddy. He was so big nobody wanted to take him home, so he spent like 6 months in the pet store. I really hate pet stores, and that pissed me off. Surprisingly, after I berated the clerks for 20 mins because they rather get their cash than see the animals go to a good home, we took him home for a ridiculous price. He is a Silver Footed Ferret, so they charge more... scumbags... Didn't have the money for him, but couldn't bear to leave him there another minute. Oh well, he turned out to be my buddy, so his name was quite appropriate. He is a wonderful ferret, and funny as hell...

Anyways, Back to the subject matter. It looks like I was able to get the 9.1 gig Seagate Cheatah up and running. I made 2 partitions below the 4 gig barrier, and 1 5.5gig partition with the remaining space. The Pre-Boot menu, or whatever you want to call the menu that comes up by holding down the 2 mouse buttons on boot up, doesn't show the 3rd partition, but I am hoping it shows up once NSDPatch and idefix are loaded.

I am getting ready to load up the drive with Classic Workbench Advanced on it to see how that works out. This 2000 will have the GVP 030/50 Combo Accelerator, the Commodore 2320 Scan Doubler / Flicker Fixer, Either a HydraNet or 2065 Ethernet Card, a DKB MegaChip with 2meg Fatter Agnus, Motherboard rev 6.2, 1 or 2 floppies, a DVD-Ram drive that will read/write cds,dvds, and dvd-ram type 1&2 carts/discs, and the 9.1 gig Seagate Cheetah...

I might Dual Boot OS3.1 / 3.9, or maybe even 3.1 / 3.5, but we will see. I want to make sure the other 5.5 gigs of the hard drive show up before I trick it out too much...

[Hewitson]

Originally Posted by Info-Seeker

The Pre-Boot menu, or whatever you want to call the menu that comes up by holding down the 2 mouse buttons on boot up, doesn't show the 3rd partition, but I am hoping it shows up once NSDPatch and idefix are loaded.

How is anything in the startup-sequence going to affect the early startup screen which appears well before the startup-sequence is executed?

Think about it mate

[Info-Seeker]

I mean hopefully it shows up on the Workbench once the drivers are loaded. Only the first 2 partitions are bootable, so I don't need it to show in the pre-boot menu. I was also under the impression that a partition had to be below the 4 gig barrier to show in the pre-boot menu.

[thomas]

IDEfix is for IDE controllers, it does not do anything for SCSI. You don't need it.

NSDPatch might or might not help, depending on the file system used. I would not install NSDPatch because I consider it superfluous. I'd rather use a SCSI-cappable file system.

Which file system do you use ?

I was also under the impression that a partition had to be below the 4 gig barrier to show in the pre-boot menu.

All partitions which can be successfully mounted before the menu is shown will be listed.

It's called "early startup menu" because it says "Amiga early startup control" in the headline.

[Info-Seeker]

I have sfs on the drive. NSDPatch nor idefix helped, I still can not see the third partition which is beyond the 4gig barrier. Anyone have any ideas?

[Hewitson]

You need to make sure you are using the Direct-SCSI version of SFS.

[Zetr0]

A bit of thread necromancy here,

Although my GVP adapters (using 4.15 ROM) could see all 3 Partitions of an 18.1GB Drive, they failed in being able to access them.

The system would partiailly boot but then crash out attempting to read/assign bits to the other partition(s) and through up a lovely message box winging about it not being accessable.

I was using SFS-SCSI Direct, I wonder if the GVP Impact Series 2 controller is not SCSI-Direct compatible, but with more reading I believe its a 64bit issue. Perhaps TD64 SFS could be used instead, alas I believe you will probably need the GVP Guru ROM for the 64bit support.



I wonder if it would be possible to boot from a < 4GB partition - that inturn updates the gvpscsi.device to omnisci.device to read / access the rest of the disk?

this boot partition could be VERY small with just a few commands or a full workbench perhaps... I must give this some more thought