gvp a2000 hc2

[deadmeat]

Hi,

I have put my personal A2000 back in full working order (varta removed and one dead TTL chip replaced). My problem is now with the GVP A2000 HC2 (https://bigbookofamigahardware.com/b...t.aspx?id=1967 that was installed, it was working when computer was stored 30 years ago but now it does not seem to be completely functional.
It has 2MB of ram installed and that works fine but the SCSI controller seems dead. The factory installed quantum hard disk is for sure toast but I have a zuluSCSI as a replacement that seems fine however when I try GVP fastprep it says it can't load gvpscsi.device and to check either rom present (it is), autoboot (j4 jumpered) and binddrivers (it is launched). I've also checked the other jumpers J5 that according to docs is testing is open and J2 disables the memory also open.
GVPinfo sees the boards (memory expansion and SCSI controller).

It would be great to have some hints on how to troubleshoot.

[SpeedGeek]

IIRC there are 2 jumpers: One disables the ROMs and the other disables Auto_Boot. Check both and make sure they are set correctly:

Then check the GVP driver ROMs and socket for bent or damaged pins. If they are in good condition then just re-seat the ROM in the socket.

You can also disable or remove the ROMs and test the SCSI controller with the Binddrivers version of gvpscsi.device:

http://babel.de/amiga.html#gvp

[deadmeat]

Originally Posted by SpeedGeek

IIRC there are 2 jumpers: One disables the ROMs and the other disables Auto_Boot. Check both and make sure they are set correctly:

Then check the GVP driver ROMs and socket for bent or damaged pins. If they are in good condition then just re-seat the ROM in the socket.

You can also disable or remove the ROMs and test the SCSI controller with the Binddrivers version of gvpscsi.device:

http://babel.de/amiga.html#gvp

According to BBAH there are 3 jumpers, disable RAM, disable autoboot and testing. I believe they are correctly set up. I've already reseated the ROMs and it looks ok, I've also read them with a minipro and the checksum is ok - the sockets are the low quality single leaf tough so I may consider changing them but will first check with a multimeter.

I will test removing the roms and loading the driver... that's good suggestion, thanks a lot. I am a bit worried because there are at least 6 PALs on the board and I have no idea on how to check if those are good.

[Orcish75]

You probably have the V1.0 GVP roms on that board, FastPrep doesn't work with V1.0 roms. I've attached the V3.15 roms that'll allow you to use fastprep, greater than 4GB drives etc. It's an essential upgrade for this board. MarkK modified the single rom to dual rom a few years ago, I'm not sure if he is on this forum, all credit goes to him. You'll need to burn the images into some 27C64 eproms.

[hcs]

Regarding the ZuluScsi sd card:
The SD card need to be exfat formatted, to use image files larger than 4GB.
The image file, need to have the extension .hda eg. HD0.hda
The image file can be created using Winuae, choose create hd file, under the floppy/harddrive option. Remember to wait untill the image file is completely created.

[deadmeat]

Ok this is becoming interesting. I have realized I know very little on how the amiga expansion card works. Please be patient...

first question: I do believe I have 1.0 roms as I have never touched them, so how do you prepare and format an hard disk without upgrading? What would be the right tool? Even back in the days I think the amiga 2000 was sold to me with the disk already installed and formatted... what did they use?

In any case I have followed the suggestion and removed both roms, then loaded GVP installation disk and after a binddrivers fastprep actually recognized the board and the zuluscsi. I managed to prep and format the hard disk on the SD. I've also copied on it the GVP installation disk. So the board itself and the zuluscsi actually work.

I then tried to reinstall the roms and boot from hd but autoboot didn't not work. I however didn't check if the hard drive was visible after loading workbench from floppy disk (dumb will have to do it).

Second question, if the disk is formatted with fastprep am I dependend on the 3.15 driver / rom to work or it should autoboot with 1.0 roms?

Third question, I don't have at hand 2764 I do have plenty of 27512 tough (and maybe a couple of 27128 somewhere) ... if I replicate the rom image to fill up the 512 it should be equivalent or am I overlooking something?

Fourth question, I have my old quantum hard drive, probably dead but if I manage to get it spin up and recognized I would like to immediately transfer the contents on a disk on the zulu. I have a SCSI cable with two plugs besides the SCSI termination topic which I'll need to deep dive do I need to name the partition on the zuluscsi something different than DH0 (as my old drive was for sure DH0) or the system will in someway manage to accomodate two partitions with same name?

[mark_k]

Originally Posted by Orcish75

You probably have the V1.0 GVP roms on that board, FastPrep doesn't work with V1.0 roms. I've attached the V3.15 roms that'll allow you to use fastprep, greater than 4GB drives etc. It's an essential upgrade for this board. MarkK modified the single rom to dual rom a few years ago, I'm not sure if he is on this forum, all credit goes to him. You'll need to burn the images into some 27C64 eproms.

Some Series I board can apparently work with a single ROM chip. Ralph Babel's web site says "Some Series-I cards need an updated version of PAL U42 to properly decode the single-ROM 3.x driver. The checksum of that new PAL is 4711."

He did upload his own version of the dual-ROM set for use with cards that can't use the single-ROM one.

The label on chip U42 should say U42/4711 if the board will work with a single ROM. See pic on amiga.resource.cx.

[mark_k]

Originally Posted by deadmeat

first question: I do believe I have 1.0 roms as I have never touched them, so how do you prepare and format an hard disk without upgrading? What would be the right tool? Even back in the days I think the amiga 2000 was sold to me with the disk already installed and formatted... what did they use?

You need the old GVP formatter program. That's available via amiga.resource.cx.

If I remember correctly, the 3.15 ROM won't recognise partitions on a drive prepped with the old software. Technically, you could edit some fields in the RDB to make it recognise them, but that's probably a bit advanced for your current situation. Maybe play with that in emulation if/when you grab an image of the hard drive contents.

If you want to preserve all the data on the hard drive, what I would do is this:

• Disable the on-board ROM.
• Boot from a floppy disk which uses BindDrivers to load the 3.15 GVP driver from disk. At this point the hard disk should be accessible via direct device access but probably no partitions should mount on it (due to the above-mentioned incompatibility).
• Mount a large-enough partition on the zuluSCSI
• Use Dev-Handler and the Extract program supplied with it (Aminet link) to read the raw data from the hard disk into one or more files on the zuluSCSI. (Those programs need Kickstart 2.04 or later. If your A2000 doesn't have that I can suggest other programs.)

It's hard to give step-by-step instructions and the procedure could be a bit hairy if your Amiga knowledge is rusty.

You can then copy the image files to a PC for safekeeping and not worry about damaging files on the hard disk.

[deadmeat]

So thanks to all of you for the advices and mark_k for steeering me in the right direction. The controller is actually working perfectly with the zuluscsi, it was just my ignorance. I've tried to use a newer program with old roms. With the old formatter everything is fine. Now I need to see if it is possible to recover the contents of my toasted quantum HD. I've managed to get it spinning when connected to an external PSU and pushing a bit the motor, I want to try connecting it to the controller and see if it is responding.

I will look into the procedure that Mark suggested, I have a question tough... the zuluscsi that I have is the RP2040 model that according to manual has this

The RP2040 model supports SCSI initiator mode for reading SCSI drives. When enabled by the DIP switch, ZuluSCSI RP2040 will scan for SCSI drives on the bus and copy the data as HDxx_imaged.hda to the SD card.

however it also says this

Depending on hardware setup, you may need to mount diode D205 and jumper JP201 to supply TERMPWR to the SCSI bus. This is necessary if the drives do not supply their own SCSI terminator power.

Any idea if this is actually something common that needs to be looked into or I can just try and see what happens? Anybody every tried imaging a drive with this mode?

[mark_k]

You could look up the drive model, there should be jumper settings info somewhere. Usually you can control termination and termination power by setting jumpers on the drive.

You could try the ZuluSCSI drive imaging feature. If your drive is fully working that should work fine. However if it isn't, i.e. there are unreadable sectors, the image file created might be broken.

[deadmeat]

Originally Posted by mark_k

You could look up the drive model, there should be jumper settings info somewhere. Usually you can control termination and termination power by setting jumpers on the drive.

You could try the ZuluSCSI drive imaging feature. If your drive is fully working that should work fine. However if it isn't, i.e. there are unreadable sectors, the image file created might be broken.

Thanks again, now before trying to spin up the drive I'm trying to be as much prepared as I can and I'm testing your procedure on an emulator.

Now my first step is to mount the hard disk file I've properly created on the zuluscsi and formatted with the Amiga - using the OLD GVP installation disk - with WinUAE. WinUAE seems to be able to emulate a SCSI HC2 card, I couldn't find however the single 1.0 ROM as the emulator does not accept 2 rom file... but I was expecting it to work like the actual board so with roms disabled the GVP installation disk should see the hard file but not autoboot. This does not happen, any idea on how to troubleshoot?

[mark_k]

Can you post your WinUAE config? Maybe you have it set to emulate a GVP Series II card, not Series I???

In Expansion Board Settings, choose SCSI controllers -> GVP Series I (Great Valley Products) -> [any of the three possibilities should work]

You can select ROM disabled then boot from the old Series I install/prep floppy and it should see the emulated SCSI controller.

Apart from that, if I remember correctly, once you manage to you get an image file of the old Quantum HD over to your PC, it should be possible to adjust the RDSK sector data to comply with the RDB spec. That will allow other emulated controllers to boot from it, including WinUAE's native uaehf.device. (You can use a binary file editor like HxD to do that.)

I think the changes needed are: change partition names from C strings to BCPL strings and fix the RDSK sector checksum.

[deadmeat]

Thanks a lot. Making progress: now I am able to emulate the GPV controller (without ROMs) and it works as expected. I had to look into the GVP 1.3 installer script because by default it only works on scsi id 0 but launching manually the commands I was able to successfully prep and mount an emulated df10: drive on the zuluscsi.

Now I want to do all over again and create a DF2 large enough to contain my old hard drive, mount it on winuae to test that everything works and that I have all the programs I need on it ... and finally I'll mount both devices (zuluscsi and my quantum) - if the drive spins I'll copy everything on the zuluscsi (I will eventually try first the imaging feature of the zuluscsi but I'm not confident I'll get it to work).

[deadmeat]

Hi I'm having a strange issue now, probably just ignorance. I'm trying to be ready with a large partition on the zuluscsi so I'm trying to format a 200MB hard drive emulating the GVP controller on winuae. I'm using kickstart 1.3 and gvp install 1.3 because I want to simulate my a2000 (I have 1.3 on it). I am able to format the disk and after the installation it is mounted and I can access. However when I reboot there's no way to get the drive mounted again. I have currently configured 2 drives in my zuluscsi a 10MB one as DH0 and a 200 MB one as DH2. Both formatted with GVP install 1.3. 10 MB one has SCSI id 0 the other 2. When I boot winuae with the GVP install disk (clearly autoboot is disabled as I don't have the single rom for winuae) and I issue binddrivers DH0 is immediately mounted and appears in the workbench but DF20: is not and mounting it explicitly "mount dh20:" does not work.
Any suggestion? I know I can try other tools but they all seem to require kickstart and workbench 2.0 which I don't on my real A2000.

[mark_k]

When you created the 200MB partition, did the GVP prep program put an entry for it in DEVS:Mountlist? Do

Type DEVS:Mountlist

to see whether there is an entry for it there.

I remember reading that old FFS versions have trouble with large partitions. Before prepping your emulated hard drive, try replacing L/FastFileSystem on the floppy disk with a later version. Version 40.1 on the OS 3.1 install disk is still compatible with Kickstart 1.3.

[deadmeat]

Originally Posted by mark_k

When you created the 200MB partition, did the GVP prep program put an entry for it in DEVS:Mountlist? Do

Type DEVS:Mountlist

to see whether there is an entry for it there.

I remember reading that old FFS versions have trouble with large partitions. Before prepping your emulated hard drive, try replacing L/FastFileSystem on the floppy disk with a later version. Version 40.1 on the OS 3.1 install disk is still compatible with Kickstart 1.3.

I think that could be the problem and also the fact that the old GVP installation software is just meant to work on DH0, and it also seems to have a bug when autoboot roms are not present (the boot disk it generates just do not work). Anyway I somehow managed, I ran the programs that GVP install runs individually supplying the right parameters. I also noticed that when running one of the commands (sformat - to do low level formatting) the partition was actually mounted and was accessible - I just need to close the program instead of formatting and it stays mounted. So good enough for me...
I managed to get the mechanical drive spinning with a bit of manual encouragement and it actually booted fine, so I rebooted using the GVP install disk, gave the binddrives command and this mounted my mechanical disk as DF0. Then I gave sformat on SCSI ID 2 and that mounted my ZuluSCSI partition that I generated on WinUAE manually launching the GVP install disk scripts ...copied all and it worked.
Did the same to mount DH20 in WinUAE where I could copy everything in a standard UAE harddisk file mounted as Dh0.

Again it was very likely the missing mountlist in DEVS as you suggest but even copying the one GVP generates do not seems to work... can do more experiments but out of pure luck I managed to do everything I wanted. Now I think I will focus on getting the 3.15 roms working … because 1.16 are really painful to use.

Again thanks...