Fastlane Z3 w/BlueSCSI v2 - file system becomes borked

[samaron]

Greetings!

Have an Amiga 4000 that I have put together, but seem to have some trouble now with getting the storage solution to be reliable. In my case it is a Fastlane Z3 v2.2 card with a BlueSCSI v2 connected.

The symptoms are that when using the computer, it can suddenly freeze or reboot on its own. When it attempts to boot into Workbench again I am greeted with either file system error messages, AmigaDOS screen telling me an error with the startup-sequence, or it does boot into Workbench. On the latter, I find that files are missing when opening drawers. The filesystem errors are something like "ALERT: Wrong dirblock id 00000000 block 460270" from the PFS-III error requester. Running PFS Doctor afterwards results in a lot of errors found.

The Fastlane card has the latest ROM (v8.5), the motherboard has a Super Buster rev. 11. Both the controller and the drive has been terminated. When the card came into my possession, the resistors where missing and have been replaced with Mouser PN 652-4608X104221331LF. It has 64MB RAM installed, but I reconfigured it to be disabled as my accelerator card has 256MB. The BlueSCSI has the latest firmware installed. Mask is set as 0xFFFFFFFF and MaxTransfer is the default 0xFFFFFF.

I've tried creating new hard drive images, changed the RDB flag to put the drive into synchronous mode, added z3dmacontrol to startup-sequence (after SetPatch). Tried the mask set to 0xFFFFFFFC as well. None of this have helped so far.

I'm a bit lost on why it appears to have data integrity problems at this point. Booting from floppy the computer runs stable. It also ran stable on IDE in the past when I borrowed a drive to test with. Does anyone have some suggestions on what else to try? Perhaps the BlueSCSI needs to be configured in a very specific way? Or maybe some quirk with the Fastlane I'm not aware of?

[samaron]

Looked a bit more at the issue today.

Reading in the Fastlane Z3 manual, I noticed a paragraph describing that A3640 cards need either an 74FCT240 or 74FCT244 on the motherboard (U103) depending on the card revision. The previous accelerator card I were using was an A3640 rev. 3.0 that had been upgraded to a rev. 3.2 by replacing U209 and U204. The manual states that U103 on the motherboard has to be a 74FCT244 if it is a rev. 3.1 A3640. I assume the same is applicable for rev. 3.2 cards as well. I verified my motherboard has this part. Although now I am using an accelerator called TF4060. If this information is still applicable I'm not sure.

Wanted to try an IDE drive to rule out that it is the system itself that is unstable. It is perfectly stable when booting from floppy. However, with this new accelerator card I found that if I connect anything to the onboard IDE, the computer does not boot. The accelecator card has a 44-pin connector, to which I lack appropriate equipment for. I have to order some connectors and make an adapter cable.
The same applies to SCSI. Wanted to try a real hard drive, but the ones I have are 68-pin drives and lack an adapter to fit the 50-pin IDC cable.

Wanted to try a program called DirDiff to compare files. Have a floppy disk with that and other tools on it. Tried to make a duplicate drawer with many files, but the drive/computer would crash every time. Got the PFS-III error requester messages as mentioned in the first post. The DirDiff experiment was a failure.

I thought that perhaps my hard drive image is compromised in some way. Ran PFS Doctor in WinUAE and got no errors. Having the image copied over to the SD card and booting from floppy to run PFS Doctor on actual hardware, I am eventually greeted with errors. It does appear to be random when it detects errors, and the drive becomes corrupted. This is with the check function running, not repair.

Reading some more on the BlueSCSI, I found that there is an additional debug parameter that can be enabled in the bluescsi.ini file. Attatched are a couple of log files that are compressed in zip-format. Log.txt is from when I were just using Workbench. The computer froze and rebooted after running and exiting a couple of applications. Log2.txt is from when I booted from floppy and attempted to copy a drawer. Were greeted with PFS-III error requesters after a few minutes.
Haven't had a good look at these yet, but nothing appear to be out of the ordinary when I quickly scrolled through. Might still be some errors hidden inbetween all the SCSI bus messages.