The Bad N00b Thread

[Loedown]

Greetings,
I run an old A2000 with a GVP 030 Combo board, populated with 6Mb of RAM, I also run a GVP SCSI II Card, I forget the model, that also has 8Mb of RAM installed, truth is, I haven't bothered pulling out some of the RAM yet, but my questions are more like;

I know the A2000 can handle 1Mb of slow RAM, what's the maximum of fast RAM it can handle and how do I go about updating it to accept such?

The SCSI bus is slow, but damn, it's slow, is there a way of speeding it up with the existing hardware? If not, let's talk options.


The hardware is connected with 3 hard drives and a SCSI CDRW, the SCSI II board has a 250Mb HDD and a 1Gb drive connected, while the 030 Combo has another 1Gb drive as the boot drive and the CDRW.

Thanks,

Paul

[Jope]

8MB of 16bit RAM maximum in the Zorro II memory space, 13 or 16MB of 32bit RAM for the Combo.

First order of business: remove the Zorro II SCSI board and only use the controller on the Combo card. See if you get a speed increase then?

Mixing 32bit RAM and 16bit Zorro II SCSI is bad news for performance.

Same as mixing a 16bit Zorro II RAM board and an onboard SCSI controller from a 32bit accelerator board.

[DC33]

Hey Paul,

As Jope has suggested, remove the Zorro II board. When I had my A2000, I had no problems with speed (during burning or otherwise) when using the 030 combo board.

I would assume you have done this already by now, but in any case, let us know if the speed has improved any.

[DoogUK]

They're right...using just the combo scsi interface it will use the 32bit fastram for access and will greatly increase the scsi performance.

The 16 bit ram creates a bottleneck.

[Loedown]

Greetings,
Many thanks for the advice, naturally 32 bit bus will provide far better performance, why I went off today and bought 1.5 metres of 50 pin ribbon cable and 5 X IDC 50 pin connectors.

Sounds like I will retire the other GVP card, see if anyone wants it, then we can haggle.

Cheers,

Paul

[Loedown]

Greetings,
Interestingly enough, I have now run everything off the GVP 030 Combo and the speed has increased very slightly, but the performance is still quite woeful. I have the card with 2 of 3 ram locations full, I was going to drop an additional 72 pin SIMM onto it today when...I found it takes custom ram GVP 64 pin. I have taken the very old 250 Mb Quantum Fireball out of the system, I am now just running an old Hawk Seagate drive and a newer Quantum, along with the Sony CRX-145S. I am using MakeCD and I have set the write speeds to 1, to indicate 1X burn, yet the damned drive wants to burn initially at around 5.3X, then it gradually winds back to about 3X before the buffer runs out at 12%. The GVP memory has been allocated as Extended Ram, it shows up as fast ram in the system window.

I figured making a backup image first would be a better idea, just grabbing data off a single drive, but no, it makes no difference.

BTW. I'll trade any amount of ram, within reason for a single stick of working 4Mb GVP 64, I have every other type of SIMM you could imagine, including 30 pin 1/2/4Mb, 72 pin EDO / non EDO 256/4/8/16/32, PC100 128Mb, PC133 a few sticks and some older DDR400 I believe.

If DC33 claims he had no issues, then I wonder what actually is the bottleneck in my machine?

Any ideas most welcome, I just want to back the damned machine up, 195 lousy Mb.

I'll have some parts available for selling very soon, all Zorro II cards, some tested, some not, if anyone is interested?

Paul

[Jope]

What is the mask setting in your partitions?

[Loedown]

Greetings,
Both drives are formatted with FFS, if that's what you mean by mask.

Paul

[DC33]

Paul,

Jope is not referring to the type of file system the drive's partitions have been formatted with, rather he means something to the effect of:
Mask = 0x7fffffff
MaxTransfer = 0x7fffffff
Blocksize = 512

The above settings are fairly "safe" however I can only assume that they will work on your drive's partitions.

I would assume that even if your drive is working ok, it is possible that the current settings are causing a bottleneck as far as the data transfer from the drive is concerned. Changing them could greatly increase the drive's performance.

Perhaps if you could let us know what settings you have, someone here (like Jope maybe) could point you in the right direction.

If it all fails, you can always send me the drive and I can back it up for you

Good luck mate.

[rkauer]

Mask = 0x7fffffff means all memory types for buffering, but accelerator's. Useful only for Amigas which the (really) FAST memory is not available at startup.

If mask is changed to = FFFFFFFF (8x F's), FAST memory on accelerators will be used. Only useful if the SCSI/IDE controller is the built-in on accelerator. External SCSI/IDE controllers can't use this setting at all. Be warned.

[Loedown]

Greetings,
Ok, I can see a problem here and I believe that my question has been answered, just in a roundabout type of way.

In WB2.04 I had a thing called mountlist, which I came to know and love as a source of driver jiggery pokery. WB3.1 doesn't have a mountlist, or not one I could find, only the entries for CD0 / PC0 etc.

Do I;

A. Need to create a mountlist entry and mark out the parameters for all my HDD, or by listing them under DOS Drivers as DH0: - DH2: with their relevant specs?

B. Use HDDToolbox, which I could never get to find the partitions that had been setup by Faaaastprep?

If I understand rightly, it would seem the system is just running under some form of default, with Rkauer's reply, if the SCSI controller is on the GVP 030 combo board, I should be able to set the mask type to FFFFFFFF, or did I get this wrong too?

Paul

[Jope]

Use faaastprep and check what mask you are running now.

The amount of bytes makes a difference in what mem range can be DMAd to and the lowest byte tells the alignment.

FF = not aligned, FE = word aligned, FC = long word aligned.

Try FFFFFFFC (or 0xFFFFFFFC, depending on how faaastprep shows it) as your mask.

If you have showconfig, run it and see where your highest memory block ends.

[Loedown]

Greetings,
Both are shown as 0xFFFFFE for the mask.

Paul

[Toni Wilen]

Originally Posted by rkauer

Mask = 0x7fffffff means all memory types for buffering, but accelerator's. Useful only for Amigas which the (really) FAST memory is not available at startup.

If mask is changed to = FFFFFFFF (8x F's), FAST memory on accelerators will be used. Only useful if the SCSI/IDE controller is the built-in on accelerator. External SCSI/IDE controllers can't use this setting at all. Be warned.

0x7fffffff is practically same as 0xffffffff because 0x80000000-0xffffffff can't be RAM (exec restriction, some memory routines use high bit for other things and most programs use signed pointers..)

[Loedown]

Greetings,
I finally got it to work, my hat's off to Jope, changed the mask to FFFFFFFF in both drives and now the whole thing happily burns at 2X without the buffer running out.

Does anyone have a spare stick of GVP 64 pin 4 Mb RAM they'd like to trade for any other type of RAM?

Paul

[DC33]

Told ya Jope could help !! Well done Jope !! Well done Paul

[Loedown]

Greetings,
It couldn't have happened at a better time, the main HDD has just started to go bad sectors, boots about 80% of the time.

Can anyone point me in the direction of a good list of available cards for A2000 please, have been reading about something Mka with 192 Mb of RAM???

Paul

[rkauer]

192Mb on A2000???? No way!

Maximum is 8Mb on Zorro II and up to 128Mb on Blizzard and some (few) other cards = 136Mb (plus one or two Mb of chip RAM).

GVP 030 Combo can have up to 32Mb using the RAM32 board (16Mb) plus the possible 16Mb directly on it.

[DC33]

Originally Posted by Loedown

Greetings,
the main HDD has just started to go bad sectors, boots about 80% of the time.
Paul

Did this start to happen more or less after you clanged the mask ? I am just wondering if you change it back to the original mask, whether it will have any effect on the "bad sectors" problem which seems to have surfaced...?


For the RAM.... same as rkauer has said.

[DoogUK]

or there is the card i have...a dkb2632 allows 112mb ram.