#GVP questions
7 messages in this thread
I've just gotten and installed a GVP Impact A2000 2/0 controller and Quantum
40Meg hard drive into my A2000. I don't have the A2000 Autoboot roms
installed. It all works pretty nicely, but two things came to my attention to
ask about, in case anyone here knows…
1) The boot script runs a program called "tstGVPscsi", which I couldn't
figure out what it did. It always seems to fail with an returncode of 20.
Anyone know what this program does? The script has a comment which seems to
imply that it does something with slower SCSI hard drives (of which I have
none…). Anyway, I've commented it out for now…
2) There is an AWFUL lot of memory being consumed somewhere here… When I
boot off the HD boot floppy, it uses over 200K more of fast RAM than if I boot
off a normal workbench 1.3 flopd. (Of course, I can't use the rd disk with
that…) Somehow that doesn't seem quite right. I *do* have the disk
paQ%Q%=9ed into three partitions, but even so, that's almost 70K per
partition… Anyone know what the details are here?
3) Is there any way to UNMOUNT a partition when it isn't being used? That
might save some memory…
4) Anyone know a good source for 256K x 4 RAMs? <grin>
–>Steve Bennett
Steve,
The memory is probably being eaten by drive buffers. No, no way to
unmount a partition…just don't mount it in the first place unless you need it
(if you can…I'm not familiar with GVP's software).
tstGVPscsi sounds like 'test GVP scsi' so I presume it's some form of
test program.
Don
Steve,
Partitions eat memory. I am thoroughly convinced that partitions are pretty
much useless appendages, left over from some primitive OS or another.
-larry
The bad thing about GVP's way of allocating resources is that even when you
boot from a floppy the autoboot roms mount the partitions. I originally had 5
20 Meg partitions that ate nearly 350K. From what I've seen the Hardframe does
the same thing, so that's probably a problem with the autoboot addition to the
autoconfigure procedure.
What we need is a EEROM or battery backed CMOS ram to store our preferences in
(Both Amiga preferences and hardware preferences) and have the
autoconfigure/autoboot routines use them.
-Greg
Well, right now I don't have the autoboot, so that isn't the problem. I had
originally created three partitions on my hard disk (1 small one for whenever I
decided to add autobooting, so that most of my stuff would still be on a FFS
partition… Hmmn… Does the GVP autoboot stuff need a non-FFS partition to
boot off of???) but maybe I'll reinitialize everything so it's all one
partition (or two, with one of them never mounted…).
GVP creates their own reserved cylinders, similar to the 2090A. With their
autoboot ROMs, the all user partitions can be FFS. I have a 20 meg disk
with one partition that is all FFS. I suspect, though, that you will have
to completely re-initialize your disk when you do install autoboot. The
auto-installation facility takes care of the reserved tracks for you when
it detects the presence of the autoboot ROMs.
BTW – my guess (and it's only a guess) is that GVP writes the mountlist on
the reserved tracks and that's why people have not been able to detect
performance differences by changing mountlist entries in their HD's
devs:mountlist file.
Somewhere (I believe in the mountlist file itself) I read a comment that
GVP had stored a copy of the mountlist in an area called the Rigid
<something> blocks for the use of the Autoboot ROMs. Well… I may as
well switch over to a single 40Meg partition, then… –>Steve Bennett