Help with setting up GVP Impact HC+8 Series II

[christopherpm]

Hi all. Please forgive my ignorance (more like memory loss) as it's been around 18 or so years since I last did this!

I have an A1500 that I have just repaired, and now I want to install a hard drive.

I purchased a GVP Impact HC+8 Series II with 8MB RAM. I then bought a 4.3GB Quantum Fireball SE SCSI drive.

The GVP card has a 4.3 ROM installed. My A1500 has Kickstart 3.1.

The hard drive is the only drive attached to the board and has a SCSI ID of 0 (no jumpers on A0, A1 or A2) and drive termination is disabled (no jumper on TE).

The autoboot jumper is on. If I hold down both mouse buttons when powering on, and go into the board diagnostic, the GVP card appears to be functioning OK.

When powering on the A1500 with this card and drive installed, it takes a short while before it boots from floppy (as the drive hasn't been prep'd).

I am booting from Kickstart 3.0 and Install 3.0. I have copied gvpscsi.device into the DEVS folder of the Kickstart floppy, and I have added the ToolType:-

SCSI_DEVICE_NAME=gvpscsi.device

to the HDToolBox icon.

When I run HDToolbox, I see it scan using gvpscsi.device, but no drives at all are shown.

'version gvpscsi.device' shows gvpscsi.device 4.13

What am I missing please?

[alexh]

Originally Posted by christopherpm

I am booting from Kickstart 3.0

Workbench 3.0

Originally Posted by christopherpm

I have copied gvpscsi.device into the DEVS folder of the Kickstart floppy

1) Workbench floppy.
2) You shouldn't need to do this with the Autoboot jumper set because it will use the gvpscsi.device inside your ROM.

Everything you are doing seems correct.

• Broken drive?
• Broken cable?
• Termination problem?
• ROM too old for that size drive? (You have four.three 4.3 and the latest is four.fifteen 4.15).

You could try the ExpertPrep 2.51 app.

http://www.gvp-m.com/expert.lzh

[christopherpm]

Sorry - I *meant* to say Workbench 3.0... Will try your suggestions right now :-)

[alexh]

Switch off autobooting and use the binddrivers version of the 4.15 ROM from Ralph Babel's site

Copy the contents to Sys:Expansion and add to your startup-sequence "C:BindDrivers".

That should show if the ROM version is your problem.

[mark_k]

A couple of ideas:
- Try terminating the hard drive. It's at the end of the SCSI chain so it should be terminated. (Though unless your SCSI cable is very long, it will probably work with or without termination in practice.)
- Could the hard drive be taking longer to initialise than the GVP ROM allows? Do you get any better result if after booting the machine up you reset the Amiga, then see if HDToolBox can detect the drive?

[christopherpm]

OK - using BindDrivers I have 4.15 now showing. However, I still don't have any drives showing.

Am I supposed to have the drive terminated? And what about the external SCSI connector - does that have to be terminated too?

[christopherpm]

An update: I've set the drive ID to 1 (JUST in case there was a SCSI ID problem). HDToolBox still shows no drives. HOWEVER if I launch GVP ExpertPrep (downloaded from above link), then SCSI ID shows nothing, then if I click on the right arrow the SCSI ID changes to 1 and the program appears to hang BUT after just over a minute, it shows the hard drive name of Quantum, the size as 0MB and blocks as 1266602.

[alexh]

That tool was quite likely written using 32-bit variables and so unreliable on a drive that large?

Try using HDInstTool instead of HDToolbox?

[mark_k]

Originally Posted by christopherpm

Am I supposed to have the drive terminated? And what about the external SCSI connector - does that have to be terminated too?

If I remember correctly, the GVP controller has on-board termination which can't be disabled (unless you feel like desoldering the resistor packs). So if you have an internal drive and no external drives, you only need to terminate the internal drive, not the external SCSI connector.

But if your hard drive is mounted on the GVP card itself (& hence uses an extremely short SCSI cable) whether the hard drive is terminated almost certainly won't be critical.

One more thing. How are you powering the hard drive; directly from the connector from the PSU, or via a small cable which is soldered to the GVP card? If the latter it might be worth connecting it directly to a PSU connector.

[christopherpm]

HDInstTool certainly is seeing the drive - Quantum Fireball SE6.4S - however, it too shows the size as 2,138,256 Kbytes = 2,088 MBytes :-( Can I get the full drive capacity?

(Actually once I put the correct SCSI_DEVICE_NAME= into HDToolBox, it too saw the drive!!!)

[alexh]

I am not 100% sure about that. Perhaps there is a problem in HDInstTool where it mistakenly uses a signed 32-bit value to represent drive size?

Proceeding further, the FFS amiga file-system on your Workbench 3.0 disk will not support large disk sizes.

I recommend you go with PFS3 the all-in-one version will enable SCSI direct for the best compatibility.

[mark_k]

Originally Posted by christopherpm

HDInstTool certainly is seeing the drive - Quantum Fireball SE6.4S - however, it too shows the size as 2,138,256 Kbytes = 2,088 MBytes :-( Can I get the full drive capacity?

Your drive is 6.4GB, not 4.3GB, which explains the strange size shown; modulo 4GB.

Disregarding that, you should be able to access anywhere in the first 4GB (actually ~4.295 billion bytes). Try setting the (fake) drive geometry in HDToolBox such that it covers the first 4GB then add partitions.

Accessing data past the 4GB point requires a SCSI-direct-aware filesystem and/or using the latest SetPatch to add 64-bit support. It might be best to see if you can get things working at first with a single FFS partition which lies within the first 4GB. I'm not sure what the partition size limit for FFS 40.1 (the version in the Kickstart 3.1 ROM) is, but it may be best to create a partition smaller than 2GB initially and see whether that works okay. If using FFS I'd recommend you get hold of the latest v45 version and install that to the hard disk RDB.

[christopherpm]

I wonder if you might be able to help a little more. I have downloaded PFS3AIO. I have the handler in the L: drive of the Workbench 3.0 floppy. I've gone into HDToolBox and added the FileSystem to the drive and saved it (with a DOSType of 0x50445303).

Do I need to remove FFS from the drive before anything will see it as larger than 2GB?

Also, what is the ideal partitioning/formatting util that will (should) show me the true drive size with PFS3AIO installed?

[mark_k]

I think HDToolBox should be able to define partitions over the entire drive, it's just the size figure it shows is wrong. (Someone correct me if that's wrong.)

You can have both FFS and PFS installed in the RDB. Kickstart 3.1 includes FFS v40.1, so you don't need to put that version of FFS in the RDB. But putting FFS v45 on there is probably a good idea since that has fewer bugs and supports large partitions better.

I haven't used PFS3 myself but I think it should be able to access partitions which are all or partly past the 4GB point.

If I were you, I'd start off by defining a single FFS partition at the start of the disk. Once you have that working properly you could add more partitions including a PFS3 one past 4GB.

[christopherpm]

Is FFS v45 freely downloadable?

[christopherpm]

Actually, that being said, am I better off having multiple partitions <4GB in size due to the limitations or disk repair and defragging tools (as mentioned in another post on this site)?

[alexh]

Originally Posted by christopherpm

disk repair and defragging tools

You're very unlikely to run such tools on the Amiga. Reformat, re-install is usually safer.

Forget FFS v45 and just use PFS3 all-in-one.

While FFS v45 is not free (you should own OS3.5 or OS3.9) I *think* you can extract the files you need from OS3.9 Boing Bag 2. And then patch to v45.16

*Extract = rename AmigaOS-Update to AmigaOS-Update.lha and unarchive. FastFilesystem is in L/

[alexh]

Any luck?

[christopherpm]

Everything is working with FFS - I've got the whole drive space in two partitions.

[mark_k]

Are you sure everything is working properly with FFS? Because (as far as I can recall) you need to run something like NSDPatch (or recent SetPatch) before mounting a partition, if all or part of it is beyond the 4GB point. And NSDPatch won't be running if the partition auto-mounts at boot time. Oh, and you also need to use a recent FFS version (v45).

It might seem to work, but you may find that writing to any partition which is partly past 4GB causes the data actually be written somewhere in the lower/previous partition. Obviously that would corrupt any files stored in the other partition.

To check whether that could be happening, you could copy a load of files to the lower partition. Then copy the same files to the upper partition. Use DirDiff to compare the two sets of files. Or you could use md5sum2 to get checksums for all files on each partition and compare the results.

If you want to use the upper FFS partition without corrupting other data, I'd suggest you edit the RDB so that the partition doesn't auto-mount. Then mount it manually (in your startup-sequence) after running a recent version of SetPatch/NSDPatch.

Or if you fancy giving PFS3 a try, that should work even when the upper/high partition auto-mounts at boot time. So you could have one FFS partition within the lower 4GB, PFS3 for the remainder.