#floptical problems (2)
10 messages in this thread
Wellllll. Curiouser and Curiouser. I have finally gotten around to
using the floptical diskettes you sent me. I am learning more and
more but still am unsuccessful in creating my own flopticals.
So far:
I have removed the terminator resistors on the 2091 board. Actually, I removed
them and added sockets. The onboard SEAGATE 177N boots just fine whether the
resistors are there or not. I have put a SCSI terminator on the end of the
external connector cable. It doesn't care whether that is there or not either.
I would have to say that either the 2091 is more robust than most SCSI
interfaces or people worry too much.
Without the onboard resistors, the floptical drive will read your flopticals
just fine. They show up on the workbench and I can read their files or copy
them to my hard drive. However, when I insert one of my new blank flopticals
there is no response. When I go to HDToolbox, both the drives are recognized
but when I click on write information to the drive (I gather this writes the
RDB?) I get an ugly black box telling me Error 29. If I try to write to your
flopticals, I also get Error 29. Also an ugly little black box. I cannot find
any reference to Error 29 in my Amigados manual (though I admit to having
troubles finding anything in that book).
Oh yeah, I tried lowlevel formatting a floptical in the IBM before using it on
the Amiga. No help there.
Does this tell you anything? It must be something crucial. I checked to make
sure your disks were not write protected.
I hope you don't mind if I keep the two flopticals a little while longer. It is
nice being able to prove to myself that the device is not totally
non-functional.
—–Paul—–
Paul;
I am afraid that there are so many "drive problems" going on, on so many
forums (not to mention at my own location) on so many different machine
that I tend to loose track….
However, have you tried "read configuration from drive"; then change disks
and do a write? I am not certain that will work but I do it quite often
here with removable media drives (it makes it a lot easier to ensure that
the carts are the same).
-bill
I'm going to try to pull in the info from several past messages to get the
whole story in one message. I hope you don't mind, the guys over in WPSG get
really flustered over the use of quotebacks. Anyhow:
floptical problems Fm: AMIGAUSE To: all
Well, after months of using it on the IBM I finally tried to use the 21MB
floptical drive on my Amiga. I've got a 2000 with a 68020 accelerator and a
2091 interface card. There's a Seagate 177N as the primary drive on the card.
Oh, I'm running 2.04 at the moment. Anyhow, HDToolbox recognizes the Floptical
as Device 4 on Unit 0 (the Seagate is 0 on 0). It can read its properties OK.
But when I tell it to do a low level format the lights for both the drives
(Seagate and Floptical) come on and nothing happens. At least it doesn't wipe
the Seagate. Oh, once I've done that I have to remove the power from the
Floptical to get the system to boot. Actually, under any conditions I have to
remove power from the Floptical to get the system to boot unless there is a
readable disk in the drive.
Any ideas what I'm doing wrong?
—–Paul—– S11
Paul,
in the future, I would recommend that you either prefix an included
message with some character, or delete either the '#' or ':' in the
message header. Autopilot, among other messaging packages, keys on the
combination of #: in the first two columns. If it enounters such a
combination in the body of a message, an error is generateed.
Just a word to the wise about messaging etiquete.
Brian
bjbart@watserv.ucr.edu
Actually, after sending that up I remembered such an issue surfacing in the
past. Memory serves too late, I fear. Sorry, definitely my error.
—–Paul—–
Paul;
Just to be sure (a terminology issue here)…
When you say Device 4 on Unit 0 and 0 on 0 you are refering to the scsi
ids of 4, logical unit 0 and 0 logical unit 0 on scsi board 0, yes? That
is you did not mention (or intend to imply that these were not all logical
unit 0 items)?
A very common problem with drives used and working on other machines that
causes them "to fail" when used on an Amiga is that a great MANY drives
report that they can handle reselection but then do NOT do so. Most other
computers will not attempt to use reselection but the Amiga will.
With your machine, I am not certain that you can turn off reselection with
one of the tools but I would suggest that you try.
Try booting the machine with the one of the carts that will work.
Double click the tool in sys:Tools/ReselectOff.
Run HDToolBox.
Select the floptical drive, select partition drive and record the
information, exit back to the main window by selecting cancel as
necessary.
Select change drive type, edit new, and read configuration from drive (I
may not be exact here on the buttons/ selections).
Change carts in the drive (install one of your carts that will not work
but that you do not mind blowing any data away).
Select ok enough times to get back to the main window in HDToolBox and
again go to "partition drive" and set the values to be the same as what
you recorded if necessary. In particular, make a note of the device
name.
Again get back to the main window and choose Save changes to drive.
Exit and reboot.
You should be able to AmigaDOS format the drive. Open a cli and type:
format drive <device name recorded from hdtoolbox> name <test or
whatever>.
This should work… if not let me know.
-bill
It looks like your SCSI terminators are OK. You can read other
people's disks. But you can't write without getting ERROR 29
(probably some kind of SCSI error). You are also using an IBM
version of the floptical drive, I seem to recall that the Amiga one
has a slightly different ROM in the drive. Maybe it is just a lack
of parity checking on one end? Are both the 2091 and the floptical
set up for parity checking?
Anyway, my floptical drive works on the Amiga and Mac and has a ROM version /
id string of: "INSITE I325VM *". What's your's?
– Alex
>Without the onboard resistors, the floptical drive will read your
>flopticals just fine. They show up on the workbench and I can read
>their files or copy them to my hard drive. However, when I insert one
>of my new blank flopticals there is no response. When I go to
>HDToolbox, both the drives are recognized but when I click on write
>information to the drive (I gather this writes the RDB?) I get an ugly
>black box telling me Error 29. If I try to write to your flopticals, I
>also get Error 29. Also an ugly little black box. I cannot find any
>reference to Error 29 in my Amigados manual (though I admit to having
>troubles finding anything in that book).
Bing! Maybe you need that mysterious file I found on my local BBS titled
"Insite – The Insite 325 unlock utility V1.00". The uploader wrote this
description:
INSITE.LHA 7261 22-10-93 Unlocks the floptical to permit write on the Amiga
It claims to enable writes to Insite flopticals. Of course, it doesn't do
anything with my floptical.
I suspect that the IBM PC flopticals have a different ROM with different
start-up settings, that don't quite work on the Amiga. My Insite supposedly
has a different ROM installed by DMI so that it works on the Amiga (and my
Mom's Mac Classic when the right boot block is installed). I'd guess that the
"Insite" program changes the settings. I'll send it to you via CompuServe mail.
If it works, please let us know.
– Alex
Look, just call Insite. They were very nice to me. Yes, the DMI floptical
has a special Amiga ROM chip on it. Insite will tell you what's wrong and
fix it, as necessary. time is money!
— Ron Legro from Milwaukee via AUTOPILOT
(The only way to fly)
SUCCESS!!!! Thank you, thank you, thank you. Worketh charmlike. I haven't
seen anything about this anywhere here (but there aren't many Amiga support
BBS's here that are worth much). We ought to put this in the library here for
others. Do you want to do it or shall I?
—–Paul—–