#A3000 HardDrive
18 messages in this thread
To Whom May Be of Assistance:
I recently purchased a 3000, and I'm having a little bit of difficulty
with my hard drive. I have the 25/50 version and I hooked up a Seagate 157N
to the daisy chain connection of the Quantum drive. The problem is that the
Seagate drive is not recognized in time for it to be mounted. If I turn on
the computer and reboot the drive is recognized because it has had time to
initialize itself. Is there anyway I can get the system to recognize the
drive? I would rather not put any waits in the startp-sequence. (I like the
speed of the 3000 boot.)
Thanks,
-Timothy Stonis
My understanding is that the Segates spin up rather slowly. Since it's
related to the Seagate itself I don't think there's anything you can really
do other than having a delay.
Craig Glaser (Software Etc Milwaukee) – via Whap!
Tim:
I had the same problem with a 2000/GVPA3001-25Mhz and a Seagte 277N.
The seagates just don't spin up fast enough for an accellerated machine
(68030, anyway). I solved it by dumping the drive. I wish you better
luck.
– Whapping from the North Coast Michael
There is a program, "BATTMEM", or something like that which will allow you
to delay the time before the 3000 goes out and looks for SCSI devices. You
can probably find it using the Amiga File finder.
John (in beautiful downtown Walla Walla) – via Whap!
I tried battmem and it still didn't work… What else can I do? Isn't there
a program that will check the bus and mount it for me? I don't understand
why battmem didn't work… The delay was long enough because I could hear
the drive waiting to be recognized. (It makes this weird faint bell-like
sound [hard to describe]) I really don't want to trash the drive…
-Timothy Stonis
Tim,
The problem is that the SeaGates store the drive information on the
drive itself…so until the drive is spun-up, self-checked and
stabilized…it doesn't know what it is. Thus, when the SCSI driver goes
out on the bus looking for devices…it ends up not seeing it…because
nothing is there…yet.
Battmem allows a longer wait for devices to come on-line, but with
some drives…it's still not long enough.
One solution is to externally power the seagate. Turn the drive on
5 or 10 seconds before you turn the computer on. Then, by the time the
computer starts to look on the bus…the drive is there.
Don
Tim–
It just occured to me that Supra has an updated Pal set and autoboot rom
that will delay the booting process if the hard drive isn't ready…
You might want to give them a call.
– Whapping from the North Coast Michael
Wouldn't it be possible to BOOT from your floppy disk, and then manually
MOUNT your Seagate near the end of the boot process? Shoot, I used to do
that with my old CLtd HD all the time…. (when there was no autobooting).
Just create a Booting floppy disk that mounts the Seagate early on (by the
time the floppy has booted the Seagate is likely up to speed), and then
xfers all control over to the Seagate.
I realize that it ain't autobooting then, but at least the drive is USEFUL
then, right?
–jp–seattle–
Tim, there is one other possibility. Change the unit number on your drive
so that it's SCSI address 6. When the Amiga boots up, it goes out and
checks what drives are on the bus in sequential order. So by the time it
gets to Unit 6 your Seagate might have enough time to spin up and be
recognized. Just a thought!
Thanks for all your help everyone… I don't know what I'm going to do. I
think I'll sell the drive to someone who can use it. (Any takers?) It
worked fine on my 2000 with the Hardframe… I like the Quantum drives
better anyway… They're a lot faster it seems. Thanks again everyone.
Tim,
My Wren III has the same problem. There is a program called BATTMEM (or
somesuch) that's in Lib 11 of AmigaTech forum. It allows you to set a 2
sec delay on power-up to give your drive time to fully power up — it works
like a champ (it flips a bit in non-volatile ram in your 3000). For an
exact filename, try the Amiga File Finder (GO AMGFF).
-sja
Thanks for all your help guys… I don't know what I'm going to do since
battmem dosen't work. Is there anyway to delay longer? Can battmem have a
four second delay instead of two somehow? I'd rather not hook the drive up
to external power. That sounds like a pain in the rear. Thanks again.
-Tim
Tim,
I don't know if the delay can be longer than 2 seconds. In my case I do
have the Wren on an external power supply, but the 2 second delay works for
me.
Tim,
Another alternative (although still not particularly desirable) is to
simply let the system complete its first boot sequence and then do the
Ctrl-Amiga-Amiga dance of fire. Since the Seagate is already spun up, it
should be recognized during this second "warm" boot.
I am in a similar situation with my 2500 with a HardFrame. In my case,
one of my disk drives puts "wierd stuff" on the SCSI bus when it's in the
process of spinning up, and the HF driver doesn't do much error checking
for weird stuff – it believes it and promptly GURU's. By the time my
monitor is bright enough to see the display, I have the old GURU starting
me in the face. A warm boot will then work. It also works when I power on
my hard disk before I power on the system, but I hate throwing more than
one switch :-). I just live with the warm-boot hassle. Of course, I
seldom turn my machine off, so it's not much of an inconvenience.
Hope this helps….
…BobR
Tim,
I don't have your problem but as an idea could you use some type of
script to mount the drive and put a delay in the script? Maybe use runback
to execute battmem (it has a user defined delay) .
Steve
Whap!ping from beautiful coastal South Carolina
Steve,
I tried putting an entry for the drive in the mountlist and then trying to
"manually" mount the drive but I got a visit from Mr. Guru. Maybe my entry
was bad, I don't know… The best solution I can think of is for someone to
write a program to check the SCSI bus and mount and drives that aren't
already mounted. How you go about doing that? Well, I'm not that advanced;
I'm still playing around with windows and stuff. 🙂 Any takers for that
challenge?
-Tim
Steve:
I don't think putting a script in the startup-sequence on the hard drive
will help… at least when I had the same problem it didn't help… because
for the system to run the script it has to read it from the hard disk,
which hasn't spun up to speed yet, soooo, if it COULD read the script to
slow down the boot, then you wouldn't NEED the script to begin with!
The only way I was able to get it to work was to boot off a floppy in df0.
That boot floppy really did nothing but binddrivers, mount dh0:, and then
transfer control to the HD. It was just enough of a slow down that the
Seagate had time to spin up to speed and check in with the system.
– Whapping from the North Coast Michael
Timothy;
I think that you may be able to get it to work by temporarily adding an
extra drive and use the toolbox to write to the boot drive. The extra
non-existant drive will cause the system to wait longer for the drive to
respond.
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bill