#SCSI Problem.
30 messages in this thread
In our Amiga 2000 we have a GVP "IMPACT A2000" SCSI Control card. It works
fine.
Recently we purchased a WANGTEK Model 5150 ES, SCSI tape backup unit. There
have been problems between the control card and the drive.
We have been told that GVP recognized the problem some time ago, and it is
mentioned in one of their Manuals. To solve the problem, a small software
utility was created by GVP – which did the job.
We very much want to get hold of a copy of that little utility – to solve our
very present interface problem.
How do we get hold of that program – for which I am quite willing to pay ?
Help PLEASE….. Regards, Hilary.
Hilary,
Have replied to your problem in AmigaUser forum, but will do again
here. Ok the program you are looking for is called "GVPScsiCtrl" and
should be one the disk that came bundled with your card. Straight
from the manual it says, "You will also need this program
('GVPScsiCtrl') if you are using SCSI devices (such as WANGTEK tape
drives) that require thier 'disconnect' flag to be turned off. Such
devices cannot have this flag set by FAAASTPREP." – from IMPACT
SERIES II FAAASTPREP 2.0
This command should go in your C drawer (or in any drawer that has been
specified in the path set up in you startup-sequence). The command:
'GVPScsiCtrl XXX DCOFF'
where XXX = unit_ID of you WANGTEK drive (ie if it was set to be unit 3
then XXX = 003).
This command is should go in your user-startup (or if you donot have a
user-startup near the end of you startup-sequence). Remember this command
IS case-sensitive so type it EXACTLY as the program is named.. Hope this
helps and hope that you will be backing-up in the near future. This
command is NOT restricted to older GVP products either as I have a brand
new GVP SCSI/RAM+ SERIES II card and I too have to use it.. Rgds.
Trent
Flying near the Pole in the Great White North
Trent.
Thanks very much indeed for your detailed reply. Somewhere I think I have got
the GVP "Faaast Prep" disk. Will take a look for the GVPScsiCrrl file….
In any case, another helper in the AmigaUser group has been good enough to
download the file to me. So my trembling has been reduced and what remains of
my confidence has been restored.
Again thanks….. HILARY.
Hilary,
No problem, and I was glad to offer a little assistance.. Rgds.
Trent
Flying near the Pole in the Great White North
Trent….
If – and when – I do get the new/repaired WANGTEK back from the vendor, there
will be a profound minute of silence and prayer in the Forum – while I gently
place the dreaded object back into Ye Olde Amiga 2000…. and turn it on!
Again – thanks for your help. With regards, HILARY.
LOL!!!
Now should TAPS be played if it doesn't work?<g> OOPS! Shouldn't bring
mention to a potential problem.. Murphy's Law and all that<g>. And a
round of beer in cheer maybe…
Trent
Flying near the Pole in the Great White North
AMEN… to all that Trent.
Incidently, yesterday I found a disk from GVP. It's called
"FAAASTPREP". Lo and behold, it did contain the GvpScsiCtrl utility
on it – plus lots of cute little programs which I have not the
faintest idea what they do. Probably put there to entice us users to
try and 'phone GVP. Ever tried that ?? They must have just ONE wall
mounted ancient instrument. You never can get through – as the
ancient crone at the other end thinks the correct way to answer is to
crank the side mounted handle. This destroys your modem in one fast
stroke, and heats up the earpiece of your 'phone. When that is done,
the crone reports success to the GVP front office – at which point
their sales dept. issue you some literature for their weekly new and
expensive products.
Just kidding…… HILARY.
Hilary,
OOH! From what you wrote you would think that there is a customer
relations problem at GVP?<g>
–>"as the ancient crone at the other end thinks the correct way to answer
is to crank the side mounted handle."
And as the phone DOES NOT have a side crank gets thoroughly confussed
and answers from a set list of options. No to answer your question,
I have never had to deal with GVP, [Getting up on the soapbox] I
usually read the manuals first<g>. From what I understand (got this
from a posting from Garry Nash (manager of their Amiga Productivity
section [if you read this sorry if I got your name and position wrong
Garry, my mind is a sieve and names and titles slip through],
apparently PA has been getting a little more inclement winter weather
than they are used too (I sympathize as I live in Canada and know
what bad winter weather is like – of course our winters are always
bad so we get used to it) and this has been playing havoc on the
phone service as well as employees (most likely) not being able to
get to work.. Guess this is where the years of patience taught to me
by living through Canadian winters come into play, just wait it out
and give yourself lots of lead time. [OK Off the soapbox].
Remember to put the GVPScsiCtrl program into your C: drawer (I know that
the manual says Expansion drawer, but ignore that as I found that it does
not do anything other than take up space) and type the command in your
S:user-startup EXACTLY as the program name (it IS case sensitive.. You
may be told otherwise, but I found that mine was case-sensitive so safe to
assume that yours maybe too.)
–>"plus lots of cute little programs which I have not the faintest idea
what they do."
Are these programs called "Expertprep" and "FastPrep"? If so, then these
two programs are for initiallizing a new hard drive that a person would
get (and both are real fine utilities – very user-friendly [KUDOS GVP]).
ExpertPrep are for those people who want more control when they intiallize
a new hard drive, and FastPrep does the same thing (just not as much
control over the various features that can be put on a new hardrive), but
is designed for those users not too familiar with initiallizing a hard
drive, or just what to get the new toy up and running as fast as
possible<g>. Again hope this explains some things, and sorry if I was too
verbose. Rgds..
Trent
Flying near the Pole in the Great White North
My cynical nature Trent, comes from being born and brought up in Britain – I
suppose. Even after 40 years here in the USA, I still look upon the doings of
the colonists with doubt and grave suspician, and am pleasantly surprised when
anything I am told turns out to be true <g>.
So…. you are in that wilderness called Canada. My youngest daughter went to
the Royal College of Art in Toronto – and finished at the University og Guelph,
not far away. I have had many holidays up there. The last one sailing the
canals/rivers up and around Peterborough. Pity that it is now so expensive –
with the new taxes.
The "little programs" are contained within a "XXXX.lzh" file. Will take a look
and let you know what they are. Probably they are for a modem…. so that one
can connect with the old crone at the musty GVP headquarters. If you want
assurance on the old crone question, I will ask my daughter to visit GVP – she
lives only about 5 miles away from GVP. I will tell her to speak loudly, so
that the GVP folk do not have to use their ear trumpets!
Will be in touch….. HILARY.
Hilary,
LOL!! –>"I will tell her to speak loudly, so that the GVP folk do not
have to use their ear trumpets!"
Now that is definitely is a good one. I thought the British were noted
for their patience, understanding and perserverence ("Stiif upper lip" and
all that).
–>"So…. you are in that wilderness called Canada."
Yup, we refer to it as the 'sticks'. At least you were kind and didnot
say 'the colonies'<g>.
–>"The "little programs" are contained within a "XXXX.lzh" file."
If this is the case then I would not know what they could be, but I do
know they could not be ExpertPrep or FastPrep from the FAAASTPREP disk.
Those two files were not compressed on mine, nor do I have any .LHA or
.LZH compressed files on my FAAASTPREP disk, pity.
–>"Pity that it is now so expensive – with the new taxes."
Huh? The exchange rate from the US – Canadian dollar is at it's best and
it's too expensive!! Well I will admit the East does have an inflated
sense of itself and will charge unbelievable prices. Donot seem to have
this problem in the West tho. If anything things are cheaper here.
Trent
Flying near the Pole in the Great White North
Don't get me wrong Trent, I love Canada.
Last trip up the canals north of Toronto, the sandflies were polite enough to
ask permission before they bit you… and they did it in two languages.
I certainly would like to see the West of Canada. Did think of taking a train
holiday from Toronto due West. The hangup was my wife. For some odd reason
she does not like to use the "John" on trains, planes or boats. She is afraid
of all the mechanics entailed in their operation. I doubt she could last the
few days such a train journey takes.
Re the $$$$. You are right. The inflation in and around Toronto has cancelled
out the benefits of the exchange rate.
If we do ever take the train journey, will bring along my old and ailing
Amiga… just for you to see. It needs some TLC !
Regards, HILARY.
Hilary,
In order to use GVPSCSICTRL, you must have version 3.12 or greater of the
FastROM. If you do not, you can get the FastROM upgrade kit from your dealer.
The upgrade kit will ONLY work on the SERIES II A2000-HC8+. If you have the
older SERIES I unit, you will need to trade-up the board to a SERIES II. You
can contact Customer Service at 215-354-9495 for Trade-Up assistance. Also, if
you have the proper FastROM but not the program, it is available over our BBS
at 215-337-5815.
GVP TECH
Mr Tech<g>,
Trade up hmmm.. I have been thinking of improving my GVP SCSI/RAM+
Series II board to a A1230 '030 accelerator. My question is does the
A1230 have a SCSI series II built in? If so, does it qualify for trade-up
from a GVP SCSI/RAM+ board? I am running on a A1200 of course<g>.
Rgds
Trent
Flying near the Pole in the Great White North
Trent,
This is getting to be habit! Still if we can help each other…
The A1230 II does not have a SCSI I/F as standard, however it DOES have a
'custom feature adaptor' which enables you to connect a GVP A1291 SCSI
I/F, which GVP claim is 'GVPs fastest SCSI controller yet' and features
the following;
DMA SCSI Design
Faaast ROM Controller
High Speed Unique DPRC Technology for direct HD to memory transfer.
Mean huh?
The advertised price over here is #79 so working on the normal exchange
rates it's likely to be $79.
It's on my shopping list, but not for a few months…
Regards
Kevin 68030/40 A1200…
Flying AutoPilot from Surrey in the UK
Kevin,
Hmmm…. Sounds like it just may be worth the effort then. A '030
powered A1200 with SCSI to boot. I like it..
Trent
Flying near the Pole in the Great White North
"The A1230 II does not have a SCSI I/F as standard, however it DOES have a
'custom feature adaptor' which enables you to connect a GVP A1291 SCSI
I/F, which GVP claim is 'GVPs fastest SCSI controller yet' and features
the following;"
We consistently 4.2MB/sec reads on a Seagate Baraccuda 1.2GB HD from the
thing…
Gary Nush
Gary,
I put the text in quotes so that people would know that they are GVP
statements rather than a claim of my own. Still, 4.2 Mb/s is VERY fast
(even my 486/66 at work doesn't get near that with a SCSI drive…
…still it is a PC huh?)
BTW, what on earth do you have a 1.2 Gb HD for?
Kevin 68030/40 A1200…
Flying AutoPilot from Surrey in the UK
"I put the text in quotes so that people would know that they are GVP
statements rather than a claim of my own. Still, 4.2 Mb/s is VERY fast
(even my 486/66 at work doesn't get near that with a SCSI drive…
…still it is a PC huh?)"
No problem… 🙂
"BTW, what on earth do you have a 1.2 Gb HD for?"
Engineering convinced the powers that be that we *absolutely needed* to have a
1.2GB, 1.7GB, and 2.1GB drive in-house for 'testing'! 😉
Gary Nush
GVP
Gary,
I wish I had an engineering department! 😉
Kevin 68030/40 A1200…
Flying AutoPilot from Surrey in the UK
Trent,
why is it neccessary to turn of the disconnect feature for Wangtec tape
drives? As far as I know these drives have no problem with disconnecting,
so is it a GVP related problem?
And where does these "unexpected status xxx" messages come from?
Thanx,
Bye, Martin
** MagicMenu & Diavolo Backup **
Martin,
I would expect it is just GVP related problems. It may have something
to do with GVPscsi.device, or it could be another unrelated problem.
I could not answer that, and the best way to probably get a proper
answer if you need one is to ask the GVP Tech in this forum about
it. I'm not a techie myself, I just pass on the lessons I learned
from the quirks of my system. I have various scsi devices (a CD-ROM,
2 Quantum Harddrives and a Wantek tape drive) and other than the two
harddrives (where you set the disconnect feature in the preperation)
all the other devices NEEDED the disconnect set to off in order to
work.
–>"And where does these "unexpected status xxx" messages come from?"
From what I have read on this forum and the others (specifically
AmigaUser), it has been said that that error message is due to an
unrecognized command that goes to the scsidevice (or something like that).
Maybe someone would be kind enough and jump in to explain this fully to us
both. Rgds..
Trent
Flying near the Pole in the Great White North
The Wangtek tape drive compatibility problems are due to a
'disagreement' between the way the Wangtek tape drive handles
disconnect/reconnect and the way the WD SCSI controller chip handles
it. GVPSCSI.DEVICE tries to handle it can, but turning it off is the
best way to avoid problems.
The Unexpected Status errors are generated by he WD chip itself and passed on
to GVSCSI.DEVICE for reporting. The numbers are sort of like GURU meditation
numbers, where the second number's definition is different based on what the
first number is. The list of all of them can be found in any WD devices book.
By the way, WD stands for Western Digital.
Gary Nush Product Manager, Amiga Division Great Valley Products, Inc.
Gary,
Thank you sir on a prompt and very informative post. I agree with you
that it is a Wangtek problem not a GVP problem.
A little off the topic, and I know you are a little too high in the
hierarchy to be even asking this question to, but I have heard that GVP
puts out a battery backed-up clock for the A1200. I have not noticed any
ads for this useful (and decidely lacking) feature for the A1200. If this
is true, (ie GVP producing one) how would one go about ordering one?
Best Regards,
Trent
Flying near the Pole in the Great White North
Trent;
BTW, excellent reply earlier about the weather related problems.
It is possible that the Wantek drive handles connect/disconnect
correctly. It also is possible that GVP is not handling tape drives
correctly. Either of these can be a real problem for both the drive
and the driver producer as scsi tape systems are not as well defined
as are HDs.
I suspect that you should have connect/disconnect OFF for the Wantek and
ON for all HDs that support the feature (though beware since some drives
report being reselect capable when they are not).
>>And where does these "unexpected status xxx"…
Well of course the "Unexpected Status" message itself is from the driver
but the number is from the disk drive that was being accessed. Basically
what happened is that the scsi driver issued a command to one of the
attached scsi devices, received a status back; and upon attempting to
decode the status, could not decipher it.
Whenever a command is issued to a scsi disk drive, the drive maintains the
current status for the progress of the command. In some cases the drive
returns the status and in other situations the controller may ask for the
status.
-bill at least they got this right:
"The less you know about computers – the more you want Microsoft Windows"
Bill,
Thanks. I also received a post from Gary Nush that explains the
Wangtek/SCSI problem quite well:
–>"The Wangtek tape drive compatibility problems are due to a
'disagreement' between the way the Wangtek tape drive handles
disconnect/reconnect and the way the WD SCSI controller chip handles
it. GVPSCSI.DEVICE tries to handle it can, but turning it off is the
best way to avoid problems.
The Unexpected Status errors are generated by he WD chip itself and
passed on to GVSCSI.DEVICE for reporting. The numbers are sort of like
GURU meditation numbers, where the second number's definition is
different based on what the first number is. The list of all of them
can be found in any WD devices book.
By the way, WD stands for Western Digital.
Gary Nush Product Manager, Amiga Division Great Valley Products, Inc."
So I suspect it is, like Gary says, a problem between the Wantek drive and
the WD chip. No problem, as GVP has been kind enough to pass along a
program which corrects this problem.
–>"you should have connect/disconnect OFF for the Wantek and ON for all
HDs that support the feature"
Well, I am running with the disconnect OFF for all my SCSI devices (and
they all work, including the HD's). The only difference between the
Wangtek and CD-ROM to the two hard drives is that the hard drives
disconnect ON/OFF button can be initiated from EXPERTPREP on the
FAAASTPREP disk (page two of EXPERTPREP), while neither the Wangtek nor
the CD-ROM can have the disconnect turned off/on from this page.
Trent
Flying near the Pole in the Great White North
Yes, I suspect that his explainations are reasonable. Indeed, usually
drive errors are reported as "mode sense" errors or "page xxxx" errors
(where "xxxx" means I don't remember the correct term just now).
It seems like the scsi bus driver should automagically NOT request
"reselect mode" for non-disk type devices. In any event, your overall
throughput may be higher with reselection off for all devices than with it
on. This is very dependent upon how the system is being used as well as
specific drive performance considerations.
Basically, reselection allows multiple scsi bus operations to be occuring
at the same time. For most single user systems this ability will not make
any significant difference. On the Amiga it further may not matter since
the OS will queue up multiple unrelated actions and interleave them
between blocks of complete actions.
For example, if you were copying a 10Meg file from one drive to another:
For the situation where the entire file will be copied in one operation,
without reselection the entire scsi bus would be unavailable until the
command completed.
However, in the first place, the Amy OS will not copy a 10 Meg file in one
operation. Thus, following each individual read operation or write
operation there is an opportunity for Ami to "sneak in" an unrelated
operation (which in itself will cause the pending copy to wait until this
interrupting operation is complete).
With reselection however, the bus is available as soon as a command has
been acknowledged. Thus, even for Amy, if a read (for our example) were
issued to obtain say 500K of data, the drive would acknowledge the receipt
of the command. At that point Ami could then go on to a different
operation with a different drive since the first drive will opt for
attention only after it is ready to transfer the requested data.
In a single drive system (at least with SCSI-I), reselection ALWAYS slows
the system down since only one operation can be pending for any one drive
at any one time (on the bus). I say "at least with SCSI-I" because while
I don't think that the situation has changed for SCSI-II I am not certain
about that.
-bill
Bill,
I run a Series II scsi and am able to access any drive and do work on it
while an operation is running in the background with no noticeable change
in performance.
Ex. I DL my AP messages to a file on the hardrive partition DH0. While
this is going on I access my CD-ROM and view IFF and GIF files, or load a
program off a Fred Fish disc I have. I have not noticed any change in
speed or any other problems (hang-ups, scrambling etc.).
Seems that with Series II reselection has been improved from Series I.
I will tank you for the post as it cleared up a few questions I had about
reselection tho. Rgds.
Trent
Flying near the Pole in the Great White North
Trent;
Beware! There is nothing wrong with Amy's SCSI-I reselection. It is the
drives that were in error. Thus, if you connect a SCSI-I drive to your
system, the potential is there for you to have reselect problems.
BTW, you example is one where you problem would not notice the difference
between reselection on and reselection off. AP does not hit the drive for
large transfers in each access. I am not certain but AP may only be
requesting or writing a few block at a time.
There are lots of parameters associated with the Amy's SCSI system that
will affect performance. Most of them are set for what is generally
optimal for reselection off, multiple drives present, moderately heavy
system load (multitasking) and moderately heavy DMA in use.
Under such setting as are "standard", setting reselection probably results
in differences that are only measurable but not perceivable. Also, the
faster the drive, the less difference will actually exist and of course
SCSI-II with SCSI-II drives will have a significantly smaller difference.
Though I am not recommending actually doing this unless you want to embark
upon a few days (weeks?) of careful testing:
You could increase the MaxTransfer and buffer settings dramatically. Then
play around with copying very large files (set copy's blocking size to
some attainable high value also).
Using activity of AP will not be valid for testing because AP appears
to be specifically "tuned" to insure that it does not interfer with
its own use of the serial port DMA. That is, it appears that Steve
took the appoach that he should set his disk useage such that he
would be able to keep up with the fastest and most demanding use of
the serial port but no more. Or in other words, he keeps his demands
for disk access to a small enough blocking factor to be "a good
neighbor" in a multitasking system.
-bill
Bill,
Thanks, but as of this time I have no problem with the way my system
operates. Matter of a fact it exceeds what I want it to do, so I have no
complaints.
Trent
Flying near the Pole in the Great White North
Trent;
That is good and also no surprise. I have played around with it a bit and
though I can measure performance differences, I can not perceive any
performance differences when both methods are optimized.
-bill