SCSI questions
13 messages in this thread
If CBM came up with the standard, why didn't they use it? I'm no expert about
this hard disk stuff, but it did seem strange that CBM didn't use the RDB
stuff.
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I wasn't aware of the chronology. My hard drive fun continues! A friend of
mine had a new A2090A autoboot controller he wasn't using for a week or two,
until his hard disk gets here. He hadn't tested it yet. So I try plugging it
in my machine, with no luck so far. On powerup, the startup halts on one of
the grey screens, and the hand never appears, and the power light blinks an
even beat. Same symptoms even if the controller isn't connected to the hard
disk. The docs for it don't warn about any special switches or settings…
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No other boards, but problem solved! I think. 🙂 A few more minutes with
GVP revealed that this particular hard disk controller was a very old model,
known not to work with Rev 4 motherboards. (Oh yeah, I forgot, there are no
differences between motherboards. Seriously, the problem was GVP's, they had
about 1 volt of ringing between an address and a strobe line…) So I have a
new controller coming tomorrow morning.
Second half of the trouble was that the 2090A (new CBM) controller *requires*
the 1.3 ROM to even work at all, so when I borrowed the friend's controller, it
wouldn't work because I had 1.2 ROMs. Isn't this fun? I have a 1.3 ROM coming
tomorrow, too, so I should be online RSN.
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On reflection, that makes sense.
My hard drive troubles are over! The new GVP arrived, my 1.3 ROMs arrived, my
autoboot ROMs arrived, and everything works perfectly. I am intensely
relieved. For a while there, everything seemed broken, and I was cussing and
steaming everyone involved, but GVP was good to me, and helped out a lot. I
lost a few weeks' work, which is worth a lot, but I got by on my other four
machines. 🙂
I did realize one last mistake this morning. The other night, I had carefully
removed all the 256K DRAMs from my Starboard, as I was getting the new
zero-to-two-meg GVP controller. There was so much extra space on my original
hard card, I had somehow thought my 256Kx1 chips would be what it wanted… so
three bloody fingers later, and three chip carriers full o' DRAM, it was done.
Then the new GVP arrived, and it needs one megabit 256 x 4 chips, which sell
for about $45 these days. Sigh. So, I think I want to avoid the Microbotics
adapter. (It would let my use the '881, but I've also heard they were a little
flakey with other cards…) I suspect a bare Micron board would be my best
bet. Does anyone have a lead on those, cheap? I heard they are available for
less than $100.
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