CompuServe Thread

Bill, Did you try it without termination? I've got a 3401 as well and it only boots w/o the termination plug in. —Mike—

Did you try booting up your 2000 with a CDROM installed in the drive? Some controllers insist on seeing some type of medium in the drive if it is on. Most of the time they will eventually timeout, but it can seem like forever. // John – (Who enjoys harrasing the vendors) \X/ Mercury@ins.infonet.net

"Can anyone advise me as to why a Toshiba TXM3401 CDROM drive attached to a GVP Series II SCSI controller prevents my A2000 from booting? The CDROM has a terminating plug, the unit is set to device #4, and the ca ble seems okay. My hard drive LED lights up and stays lit, but nothing happens. Help!/EXIT" How about the cable LENGTH? The Toshiba 3401 is known to work fine. What other drives are connected? What other drive(s) is terminated? Have ou tried terminating the CD-ROM on the drive itself — not with a termination plug? Unfortunately, your message didn't include much background about your system, so it'll be hard to provide an answer immediately. GVP TECH

1) make sure there is no other id 4 in the system. 2) make sure that, if you are going to use the term plug that you removed the terminating resistors that may be in place on the unit. (Double term can be as bad as no term). 3) make sure that it is the only device on the external chain that is terminated (and is preferable the last in the chain). Also, if you have only one internal drive and it is mounted hard-card style, GVP stuff usually works better if it is unterminated. 4) DON'T use made-for-macintosh SCSI cables. They cheat on the number of conductors in the cable, ususally, and on the Amiga's faster SCSI drives the sloppy electrical characteristics of the Mac cables cause no end of problems. Believe me!! I've tossed out several Mac cables once I found the problem. Go to a good electonic store and lay our the extra bucks to insure you are getting a cable with at least 25 conductors (50 is better) in it. And keep the cable run short. 5) you may need to alter the termination of one of the internal devices run from the card. GVP tech support will generally admit that the termination situation with their products is a "try all possible combinations until you get one that works." I run my 3401 with the PRTY open, PRV/ALW open, Test Open, and TERM shorted from a G-Force 040 card. Note that the later GVP cards (at least according to the docs) do not supply termination power. The earlier cards do, so you might need to remove the TERM jumper. wmc – via Autopilot!