Different Versions of HDToolbox or is my SCSI HD maybe failing

[bugsymalone666]

So I am in the process of trying to troubleshoot my SCSI HD which was fine until a few weeks ago when I started trying to do more things. Its an A590 on a stock A500, the A590 came with a 20mb Segate, but I fitted a 1gb IBM about 12months ago.

Since I got the SCSI 1GB IBM hd its never quite been straight forward for some reason, eg I had issues with not being able to see my SCSI CDROM with it attached, but without I could and I have lost count of what various combos I have tried with the original Seagate 20mb drive, the 1gb IBM and a Sony Caddy CDROM where it would and wouldnt work.

Recently I decided I wanted to try building the HD in WinUAE, so in Linux formatted the drive and tried getting it to work with FS-UAE. I must admit I dont like FS-UAE compared to the amount of available options in WinUAE. FS-UAE couldnt see the drive at all/wasnt able to select it, but with WinUAE I could at least see it.

Anyway when I put it back in the Amiga realising you ideally need to format it on a Native device the drive was blank. So I was using workbench 3.1 disk set with the HDtoolbox that had, formatted and partitioned the drives but then next time I rebooted the machine the drives were not there. Confused I decided to use workbench 2.1 disk set (as I have a 2.05 rom) which could see 2 SCSI devices one at ID3 one at ID5. I know I had been playing with my CDROM and thought I might have set it to ID5 although I thought it was ID6, still 2 SCSI drives what else could it be?

So that was Xmas day and today during my lunch I thought I'll remove the extra chip ram that wasnt proving super reliable inside my machine and with the 2.1 HDToolbox sure enough same ID's, only 2 devices connected to the Amiga the HD and the CDROM.

Booted up A590 HDToolbox - one drive! so I was a bit confused at this stage and wondered how HDToolbox differs from install to install version?

Anyway I put WB2.1 Install disk back in and reboot and run that, it can still see 2 disks, I thought well I'll use ID3 because I know full well that was supposed to be the HD, use the HDinstaller tool and suddenly WB2.1 appears on the hard drive without having to be installed using the 5 disks (it was previously installed on this disk) on an 8mb partition. I thought this sounds like one of the partitions I had done on Xmas day!

Then I tried out SysInfo and it got a bit weird, sysinfo said 2 scsi drives, ID3 IBM 1033mb ID5 IBM 0mb.

I have hopefully attached some pictures to show what I mean. I wondered if it its the disk electronics starting to go, a bad format or who knows what.




The other weird bit in SysInfo is it could see a disk called 'Work' which was one of my other partitions but unable to see it from WB.

The HD now boots on its own and shows the WB2.1 Folder that is 8mb, so I am now confused as to what the problem is, but Xmas day I tried several times to partition the hard drive and install workbench, each time it would end up non booting and blank.

are all Amiga HD's this painful to setup? How does IDE rank on the use and swap into a PC for use with UAE software (I have considered a IDE to SDcard affair along with SCSI2SD)

I love a technical challenge but I am starting to feel this might be the next level of challenge!

[thomas]

Please run this on your Amiga: http://thomas-rapp.homepage.t-online.../hddreport.lha
and attach the hddreport.txt file here.

[bugsymalone666]

Ok I managed to run a report, but unfortunately didnt have time to get it back from the Amiga to the PC so I took photos:




Theres more to follow..

[bugsymalone666]

So thats what it said

[thomas]

Was this when you saw the CD drive or not? The report does not show it. Would be interesting to see if the report shows the same differences as HDToolbox.

It would also be interesting to run the various versions of HDToolbox after booting from the various floppy disks. It might not be HDToolbox itself but the floppy which contains some updated drivers which make the CD drive appear.

What does your SCSI bus look like? Is it properly terminated at both ends and only at the ends? I suppose it is controller <-> IBM drive <-> CD drive. If the IBM drive has termination enabled it might give unpredictable results for the CD drive.

[bugsymalone666]

Ok so when I say see the CD Drive, thats been the thing I cant see a CD drive as I dont have a CDFS yet, but from a SCSI drive point of view.

When I thought I was seeing it was this in HDToolbox (picture in the first post) where I saw 2 ID numbers 3 and 5. I know 3 is the HD so assumed 5 was the CD. This was on a WB2.1 install disk. With A590 HDTools you dont get this just ID3.

My setup is more like:
IBM<>internal A590 SCSI connector<>controller<>25pin External SCSI<>CDROM drive

So the IBM I think has active termination, which has never been enabled, the A590 I think has a set of passive resistor termination which are still in place. The CDROM has onboard passive termination which I tried, (2 sets of resistors) but removed and have an external passive on the data cable.

I also have a data tape drive too which I tried adding to the chain or removing the CDROM and putting it in place, but equally the Various HD toolboxes dont see it.

Then another instance I tried a long time back was moving the CDROM to the 590 connection inside and put the original Seagate drive in the CDROM case, I am pretty sure I could see that, but when replacing the Seagate with the IBM you couldnt.

Old SCSI seems really finicky, I'm sure when I was working with the stuff in 1997 it wasnt this bad!

[McTrinsic]

Why do you terminate the bus with the passive terminators on the A590 if you connect something to the bus??

[bugsymalone666]

Originally Posted by McTrinsic

Why do you terminate the bus with the passive terminators on the A590 if you connect something to the bus??

I assumed the A590 is built with them, in the picture below there is one of the long multi resistors like in the termination near the XT socket at the back, maybe its for something else.



If they dont have internal termination due to cable length or something then I dont have extra termination, just the one at the end of the CDROM chain.

[patrik]

According to the A590 schematics, the passive SCSI termination consists of RN1, RN2 and RN3.

It is a very bad and confusing practise to solder the termination like that to a controller with both internal and external connectors.

The issue being that you cannot correctly terminate the SCSI chain if both internal and external devices are connected: The SCSI chain will in that case have one end at the internal cable and one and the other end at the end of the external cable and you shall only terminate at ends, but that won't be possible as the controller has its soldered termination in the middle of the chain.

There is however a way where this can be correct: The SCSI specification allows a short stub cable per device from the chain, somewhere along 10cm (they won't cause reflections at that length). So if you see the controller and its termination as one end of SCSI chain and the internal cable in the A590 as a stub and don't terminate the drive, it will be correct according to specification.

However, as soon as you use a longer cable or more than one device on the internal connector in combination with external devices, this will not be correct and you must remove the soldered termination from the controller and terminate at the end of the internal cable for correct termination.

So this shouldn't really be a problem on the A590, as you normally only fit one drive with a shortish cable on the internal connector, but for example on an A2091 and all GVP cards, they should definately not have soldered the termination resistors to the controller. They should instead have had them socketed or better not any at all and instead bundled the card with an external DB25 terminator for the external connector, so you didn't have to open the computer and remove the terminator resistors when attaching external devices.

[bugsymalone666]

So technically termination shouldnt be a problem to have 1 internal and 1 external device?

The internal device needs no termination, but the external one needs it?

It might explain some of my problems.

I had thought about towerising the Amiga and building an adaptor to fit the A590 inside at 90degrees to the main board then having both a scsi HD and CDROM on one cable inside, this would require me to remove those termination resistors anyway.

I guess maybe my next step is to remove the resistors and then see what the HDToolbox sees, it might just then see 2 drives, or it might see more!

[patrik]

Originally Posted by bugsymalone666

So technically termination shouldnt be a problem to have 1 internal and 1 external device?

The internal device needs no termination, but the external one needs it?

I am not gonna say yes to that question as then someone will misinterpret it and terminate something incorrectly.

As I wrote: if you have something external connected, you have the option to terminate by spec if you:
1. Terminate the external end (the ends and only the ends should always be terminated)
2. View the controller with its soldered termination as the other end.
3. Connect one internal device with a short stub cable (~10cm) and don’t terminate it as you are already at the end when using the stub and you don’t want more than one terminator there.

With everything said here, asynchronous SCSI-1 usually works even if you have three terminators (the incorrectly soldered ones in the middle), but it is surely worth trying to achieve correct termination to rule that out.

On the subject of termination, it is also worth verifying that you have termination power on both internal and external connector. The A590 most likely is built to supply it, but it can easily be damaged - a classic is by connecting a printer to the external port which shorts the TERMPWR pin to ground.

On-device terminators can be powered by the drive itself (often configurable), but separate terminators can only be powered by the TERMPWR pin. With no termination power, the termination doesn’t work correctly, disregarding if it is passive or active.

Also double-check the SCSI ids so there isn’t a jumper if error. I remember one drive ended up responding to all SCSI ids when using an external box with one of these id-switchers incorrectly connected.