#BBoard hdrive not workin
17 messages in this thread
Ok here's a tale of woe and a huge plea for help.
I recently bought a 386sx bboard from C= and it worked fine with a 32mb
virtual drive although a bit slowly. I got enthusiastic and bought a multi
board with svga 1mb video ram, IDE, floppy controllers serial ports etc.
And just to top it off a nice 170mb Conner drive.
The multi board works a treat as far as the video is concerned, also the
hd floppy drive works ok.
So I plug it all in and make doubly triply sure the ribbon cables were the
correct way round and off we go; or don't. I get amessage come up on the
dos screen saying 'Hard disk controller failure'. The BBsetup utility had
been set up to auto configure and get the info off the drive. No go at
all. So a good friend who is a dealer and general boffin tokk my hdsik and
multi board and slotted same into his 386dx box. Yup, it all worked fine.
Today I checked the ribbon cable with a multi meter and that was OK. Also
checked that any ports that make be in contention with the bridge board
were disabled and still I get the 'Hard disk failure error'.
I seriously bothered about this and would ask if anyone at all can help
with this problem.
Much gratitude and kindly spells will be showered upon he or her who comes
up with a fix.
Pete
Did you remove your aboot.ctrl for your PC/system draw.
Try setting your PC setup HD prefs to user instead of auto.
Elite MicroComputers – Flying high on AutoPilot
Dave,
Thanks for the response.
Yes I removed aboot.ctrl
I'll go away and try setting bbsetup to user
Pete
Pete,
The secret is simple. First, you need to get into BBsetup and go to
the first hard drive selection and choose User (40). Enter the parameters for
the drive from the data sheet that comes with it for the number of cylinders,
heads, and set the wpc and landing zones at 0. Save the settings. Now when you
reboot what you have to do is the following:
In your startup-sequence where you run Binddrivers add immediately after the
binddrivers command sys:pc/pcreset TWICE. That is you must run PCreset twice
after you run Binddrivers. It will work then. Don't ask me why. I don't know
why this is necessary with the multi-I/O card, and there may be a more elegant
solution, but this will work. It's what I had to do to get the thing to boot
properly. Don't forget that before you reboot the Amiga that you do all the
stuff needed to prep the drive for MSDOS. You need to do an FDISK and then
FORMAT C: /s. This will need to be done from a floppy boot on the PC side.
After you have done that copy the necessary MSDOS files to the hard drive.
Then go back to the Amiga side and put in the two PCreset commands, do a warm
boot and all should work.
Phew!! Thanks Stephen.
I'll let you know how I get on
<Time passes>
Ok done all that and…….ZIP, no go at all.
I phoned C= tech support in tech UK and they very kindly helped as much as
possible but to no avail.
From what I have been told all IDE drives are congured for IRQ 5 and as
this seems to be a standard then it is reasonable to assume that the IDE
on the multi board is IRQ 5.
Also tried swapping the BBoard in the 2 pc slots just in case but that
didn't help either.
What I find weird is that given the multi board and hdrive work perfectly
well in a proper dos box why shouldn't they on my BBoard, bearing in mind
that they are connected by no more than a 40 way ribbon cable. Very weird
indeed.
Pete
Pete
You will need to double check your IRQ settings. You may have an Interrupt
conflict. If you have a program like msd.exe then you can see what IRQs
are being used by the Bridgeboard. According to msd my 2386 Bridgeboard
uses the following interrupts 0,1,2,6,7,8,9,14. You may also be having a
address conflict, where does the I/O Board live in memory. Or you may have
a DMA conflict. That is a little more of a problem. Let me know if you can
figure out what IRQs your bridgeboard is using and I will try to help
more.
Greg
Greg Givler – CBMSER Sysop
Commodore Product Assurance
MSD is not a good program to check the IRQ's. It is only accurate if the
IRQ corrisponds with the normal device. IE if you have serial 2 set to
IRQ10 instead of 3 (the normal) it will not find it.
Dave
Elite MicroComputers – Flying high on AutoPilot
Thanks for the information. Do you know of a utility that is better? Also
do you know of one that can detect what DMA channels are being used by the
Bridgeboard.
Greg
Greg Givler – CBMSER Sysop
Commodore Product Assurance
No…but I am constently looking for one.
Dave
Elite MicroComputers – Flying high on AutoPilot
Thanks Greg,
I'll let you know how I get on.
Pete
Are you conflicting IRQ's with other devices on the I/O board? This can
set off a string of strange events.
Dave
Elite MicroComputers – Flying high on AutoPilot
Dave,
I meant to ask you yesterday if you have any idea when the new BBs are
due in? I know you were expecting them last week, but when I called
Computability about my 3000 tower I have on backorder, they had extended the
backorder time another two weeks. Wonder if you've heard the same?
I'vee been expecting them any day C said I would have them by Yesterday.
I called them today, and they confirmed they shipped, so it should be a
matter of time.
Dave
Elite MicroComputers – Flying high on AutoPilot
Dave,
I'll have to call Computability tomorrow and see if there's been any
progress on the 3000T. I'm sort of assuming that if CBM has finally shipped
the BBs, then they may have gotten all the backordered stuff on the road.
Can't understand why it took them this long to get stuff out. Guess they were
overwhelmed with orders given the aggressive pricing and didn't goose up the
production lines!
With all the excitement that seems to have been generated by the price
reductions on the 386sx bb, it would seem that this has been sort of a mini
boom for C=. Do you have any idea how many 386bb have sold in the past few
months ? Since the prices went down ?
None….I still haven't gotten my shipment.
Dave
Elite MicroComputers – Flying high on AutoPilot
Pete,
What multi-I/O board do you have? Is this the Oak or STB? You might
want to check and see if the parallel port is assigned to IRQ 5. It should be
assigned to IRQ 7 and the serial ports should be assigned to IRQ 4 and 10 for
COM1 and COM2, respectively.
You might also double-check to be sure that you have HDRIVE0 set to
USER in BBSETUP. Do you get any message during the Janus initialization that
your CMOS setup is incorrect? On the PC side if there's any problem you'll get
a message that the CMOS settings are not correct and that the boot has failed.
That's a clue to incorrect setup for something.
When the Amiga boots Binddrivers is normally run early in the boot
sequence. Does the hard drive turn on and come up to speed at that point? You
should hear the drive turn on shortly after Binddrivers executes. If it
doesn't then you might have a bad power connector, although nothing you've
reported seems to indicate that's a problem. Again, in your Amiga
startup-sequence you want to have the following lines:
run Enforcer >nil: quiet Binddrivers run sys:pc/pcreset run sys:pc/pcreset
.. <remainder of startup stuff follows>
You should insert these lines somewhere early in the startup-sequence.
CBM recommends they run before LoadWB. I have mine inserted just before IPrefs
runs. I am assuming with the above that the path statements have already been
setup and that PCReset is located in sys:pc. If not, then just put in the
correct path to whereever you have them.
If you haven't been able to run FDISK and FORMAT on the drive, then you
want to do the above, reboot the Amiga and see if that works. Doublecheck to
be sure you have the correct drive parameters setup in the CMOS settings. I
don't know which drive you have, so you might pass that along as well as if you
know what parameters to put in. For instance, I have a Maxtor 7120A. It's set
up as USER 40 with 936 cylinders, 16 heads, wpc is 0, and landing zone is 0.