Amiga 3000 is alive!

[cchaven]

My upgraded Amiga 3000 has booted fully for the first time in a number of years! I've pulled it out a few times over the last few months only to find that the 4GB Quantum Fireball hard disk has a checksum error. Then earlier this evening, the PSU wouldn't even power on...so I went thru and rechecked all of the connections and got that issue resolved. Though I still need to hook a second drive up to it to try and clone the Fireball before it won't boot at all, I did finally get it to fully boot. Woohoo!

Jeff

 

[cchaven]

Does anyone have any ideas on how to fix the errors on the hard disk on my Amiga 3000, so that I can copy as much as I can off of it?

I've spent the last 3 days dealing with SCSI issues on both my A3000's. The one with the Cyberstorm was my main machine for a while and has registered version of YAM, Miami, Aweb II and Shapeshifter on it, as well as things such as Adoom. The other is a stock A3000 that the previous owner had hacked for a Video Toaster. Both still have the original custom chips. Neither will allow me to hook a second drive up to the built-in SCSI bus. This is why I stopped using them. Both have 40.68 ROMs installed.

On the Toaster machine, I had previously put a new install of 3.1 on it. I took the Toaster out and put an A2091 (6.6 rome and 04 SCSI chip) in it's place and hooked an older NEC CD-ROM to it and the machine was then quite happy to install 3.9 off of CD, with no SCSI errors or lockups. In fact the speed was quite good.

On the 68060 upgraded machine, due to the checksum errors on the hard disk, I've not made any progress whatsoever. Disksalv in repair mode booted off a floppy, even crashes the machine at random points. Since the A2091 worked so well in the other, I plan on upgrading it's ROMs and SCSI chip and using it to mount a second hard disk so that I can save what I can off of this machine. Thankfully the data partition seems to be fine currently.

Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks

 

[KC9UDX]

If you can't get six drives to work on that bus you're doing something wrong.

What filesystem is on the dead drive?

In my opinion, respectfully, if you're not the kind of guy who can already fix this yourself, you probably aren't in a position that someone else can help you over the internet.

 

[cchaven]

If you can't get six drives to work on that bus you're doing something wrong.

What filesystem is on the dead drive?

In my opinion, respectfully, if you're not the kind of guy who can already fix this yourself, you probably aren't in a position that someone else can help you over the internet.

Thank you for the reply. The finicky nature of the A3000's SCSI system is well known and I've had three over the years. I checked and rechecked the various bits and both of my current A3000's require different setups to work.

You're correct though that you likely couldn't provide constructive suggestions regarding the question.

 

[cchaven]

After spending the weekend troubleshooting the accelerated A3000 that had the checksum error, I found that the install of OS 3.9 was missing some of the 68040 and 68060 libraries. It still booted with just one 68040 library installed but gave random read/write errors on disks. Since the System partition is read only due to not being validated it's obvious that this problem has been there a long time. It's been 16 years since I installed the 060 and OS 3.9, so who knows what happened there. Since this A3000 has an internal HD floppy, I made a HD copy of the WB 3.1 Install disk and put the Phase5 libraries for the Cyberstorm on it. I also have one of the modified external Dell HD floppy drives.

This did stabilize the system more and I was able to copy some of the data off of the system partition to the larger data partition. I then reformatted the System partition and re-installed OS 3.1, making sure all of the 68040 and 68060 libraries were where they were supposed to be. Originally I had used an Apple CD-300 to install OS 3.9, but I no longer have that drive. I have a newer NEC CD-ROM that I used without an issue to install it using the 2091 on the other unaccelerated A3000 (Rev 09 mainboard) and it worked great. Using the same CD-ROM on the accelerated A3000 (Rev 7.1 mainboard), trying it on both the 2091 and the built-in SCSI bus, randomly locked up the SCSI bus. I've not tried to change Maxtransfer on the hard disk, but I did change some of the SCSI bus settings with SCSIprefs. I plan on putting a rev. 08 SCSI chip in the system.

I've been methodical in checking things and trying different things and I'm fairly confident that the problem is the rev. 04 SCSI chip, so we'll see once it arrives and I tear the system down. I'll be making sure all chips are still firmly seated when I have it apart. I'm happy with the progress made. Both systems had their batteries removed years ago.

Jeff

 

[KC9UDX]

Yes, do get a new SCSI chip, as well as a Rev 11 Super Buster if you haven't already.

The A3000 SCSI is only finicky with older chips. I've been using two of them for twenty years now and with the newest chipset in them, the SCSI is rock solid. More reliable than any other machine I've used with SCSI, including Sparcstations.

I don't recall any issues when upgrading to 68060. But it has been a long time (I have one of the first CyberstormPPCs, I pre-ordered it) and I think I only ever reinstalled the OS when I switched to OS4. So I may have had a problem that I can't recall. I've forgotten most of what I knew about troubleshooting Amigas because it's not an everyday exercise like it is with Wintel machines.

I would highly recommend switching to PFS3 filesystem. There was a new release of it recently that fixes the bugs that it had, but even prior to that it was much safer (and faster) than FFS. You won't regret it.

 

[rittwage]

SCSI is tricky with drive compatibility and termination. Some combinations just don't work even if you follow the rules, but you can swap around connectors and they will...

I have one A3000 with the original 1.4 kick roms. It works fine when 2.04 is kicked, but if I kick 3.1, it stays at a black screen until I unplug the second hard drive.

Anyway, if you mean the external SCSI connector, there is a diode on the board that gets blown that can cause power from external drives to get into the system, which is obviously bad. You can test diodes with a multimeter easily- just set it to continuity and test both ways (red to black, then black to red) and it should only have continuity in one direction. If both, change it.

 

[cchaven]

Well I took the 3000 (Rev 7.1 with Cyberstorm MK II) apart tonight and it has all of the latest chips already installed. It's the other 3000 with the Rev 9 board that still has the earlier chips. I made sure all chips were seated properly, including the RAM on the CPU board. Chips are WD SCSI 08, Super Buster 11, Gary 02, DMAC 04, Ramsey 07.

I put it back together and all booted up fine. Just as before though I got random SCSI bus lockups when trying to install OS 3.9 from CD. I then pulled an Apple 600i CD-ROM out of a Mac 7300 and tried it. I believe they are 4x speed. Same thing ...random lockups. Same thing with either CD hooked up to the 2091 instead of the 3000's SCSI controller.

I'm thinking it's time to take a closer look at how the 4.0GB Quantum Fireball is set up. Maybe even pop it into the other 3000 and see what it does in there.

 

[Caluser2000]

I've forgotten most of what I knew about troubleshooting Amigas because it's not an everyday exercise like it is with Wintel machines.

You must be doing something wrong then....

I own a couple of Amigas btw. Amigas are no better than any system going on 30 yo. It is neat that Jeff is sharing his experience with us. We all learn a little bit. Thats what makes these forums so great.

 

[cchaven]

Another evening of working on the 3000's. I rechecked all the drives again, setting both hard disks to ID 0 and swapping the drives between the two machines. I did find that term power was set wrong on the Seagate from the non-upgraded Rev. 9 machine. The only thing with the Rev. 9 machine is that I have to have an external terminator present on it if no external drives are present.

I then tried to install OS 3.1 then 3.9 on the Rev. 7.1 68060 upgraded machine and just as before with the Quantum Fireball installed it seemed to go well until it was time to boot from the Emergency floppy. Just as every other time, it booted but failed to see the same CD-ROM that it had seen moments before from OS 3.1. The Rev. 9 machine with the same CD-ROM made and booted from the Emergency bootdisk and installed OS 3.9 on both hard disks flawlessly, No SCSI lockups and the NEC CD-ROM was connected to the 3000's external SCSI connector.

I swapped hard disks back, putting the Fireball back in the Rev. 7.1 machine, having copied the Phase5 libraries onto it prior to shutting down. It seems to be running OS 3.9 well from it though I'm still puzzled by some of the things, such as failing to boot from the Emergency bootdisk created during the installation try. Maybe a timing error caused by something like RAM?

I'll likely stop here since both machines are set up and functional now though I may use an external drive and copy some of the downloaded archives off of the Rev. 7.1 machine.