Refurbed A4k takes longer to boot!

abraXXious

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Weird!

I have back two a4k mbs and daughterboards after having caps, simm sockets, rca sockets, op amps, batteries etc etc replaced.

They both perform flawlessly, with one strange quirk. They now sit there for about 30 seconds before attempting to boot, but when they do boot they boot up quickly and run prefectly.

One of the systems is as follows:

A4k desktop with 3.1 roms and 16 mb fast
Cyberstorm Mk III 060 @ 60 Mhz with 128 Mb fast
DKB 3128 with 128 Mb fast
Cybervision 64/3d + Scan doubler module
Deneb USB Card
Ariadne II network Card
IDE DVD Burner
73GB Seagate SCSI HD
HD Floppy Drive
350 watt atx PSU (adapted into the original a4k psu case)
Running OS 3.9

When I first switch on I get teh brief green screen and little tune by the Deneb Card, then it sits there for a good 30 seconds before booting. It then boots for like 1 second and resets (os 3.9 - normal) then playsthe Deneb tune (and green screen), then waits again for like 30 seconds before booting up to wb.

The systems were apart for quite a while waiting for the mbs to be done, so a jumper setting may have been bumped etc... any ideas what is causing the long wait before booting?
 
The wait appears to be like a device timeout - have you checked as to which hardware device is set to boot first? Boot holding both mouse buttons down and you may find that the board went back to factory default as a result of the repairs.
 
Hi Merlin,

thanks for the reply. I held down the two mouse buttons to get to the early boot menu and it shows the first boot device is DF) (naturally) with a priority of +5, followed by AmigaOS (DH0:) with a priority of 0 - this should be correct as when a disk is not present in DF) it should then boot off AmigaOS.

Is there anything else I should be checking?
 
The 30 second delay sound like the 3.1 ROMs looking for an IDE device on the native IDE.
Have you got anything other than the DVD ROM connected up to your IDE?
 
The 30 second delay sound like the 3.1 ROMs looking for an IDE device on the native IDE.
Have you got anything other than the DVD ROM connected up to your IDE?

Indeed. I'd put money on it being the 3.1 ROMs. Any Amiga with Kickstart 3.1 will sit about for 30 seconds if there's no IDE hard disk to boot from.
 
The 30 second delay sound like the 3.1 ROMs looking for an IDE device on the native IDE.
Have you got anything other than the DVD ROM connected up to your IDE?

Indeed. I'd put money on it being the 3.1 ROMs. Any Amiga with Kickstart 3.1 will sit about for 30 seconds if there's no IDE hard disk to boot from.

Yep my A1200 does the same, if I have nothing on the native IDE then there is a 30 second delay before booting starts from Blizzard PPC SCSI.

If I have somthing connected, even if its just a blank Amiga formatted CF card the it boots up pretty much right away :)

These are in fact very useful for file transfers, you can route them to a PCI Backplane or front CF slot, although not hot swappable make for a useful way to get files from WinUAE to the Amiga.

Steve.
 
@abraXXious I had the same problem but after installing a SCSI-DVD I terminated the IDE bus making the boot very fast.
Terminators can be obtaind at AmigaKit
 
I agree: the problem is that you only have a removable media on the IDE and no HD.

Put a second device on the IDE chain or move the CD/DVD to the SCSI chain with a SCSI2IDE bridge and a IDE killer on the IDE header.
 
Thanks for the help guys.

Okiez, I have some trendy compact flash to IDE 40 pin adapters (the ones that mount in the external PCI slots). So if I installed one of these with say a formatted 4gb compact flash card then it should boot immediately?

If so, can the flash card be formatted simply in FAT? Or must it be formatted in a native Amiga file system (FFS, SFS, PFS etc)?
 
Anything you want, from not formatted at all to FAT to FFS or whatever.
 
So even an unformatted ide storage device will force the miggy to assume no other bootable IDE devices are present and move straight onto the scsi? Great, thanks!

Will post my results. :)
 
Update! Installed an IDE to Compactflash adapter and a 4g Compactflash card - made no difference on first boot.

Installed the drive and partitioned with HDToolbox and upon next boot the wait time was less. Probably 15 seconds now. So it has worked.

Would be nice to reduce this wait further, but I can live with this.

Thanks for your help guys.
 
Don't make make bootable partitions on the CF and the boot process may be faster, but I doubt you can improve much the time.

Put the SCSI HD ID to 0, modify the LUN to 1 if no other SCSI device is on the chain and that's it.
 
you can get an IDE killer from AmigaKit =)

No it doesn't KILL the IDE just terminates it - but remember if you do, you wont be able to use any devices on it.

I would say that you should look into making your own KickROM's with this you can reduce the 30 second wait to 8 seconds with just a patch - you may be able to add more - but you are limited to 512KB on the A4000 as opposed to 1MB (possible up to 2MB) on the A1200 and A600 funnily enough.

I think the A500+ can handle 1MB as well, anyway you should look at replacing the scsi.device that is in the KickRom for the newer (>4GB NSD compliant) scsi.device

This will save you a ROM Update Reset (9 seconds) and then another 9 second reboot (18 second)

what OS are you running at the moment?
 
well without an ATA compliant device on the IDE chain you will suffer a most horrid 60 - 90 second delay on

boot - check - rom update - reboot - check - resident update - reboot - load wb

I have that on my A4000 as I am running from my CSMk2 060 and SCSI

With a device on there you are looking at a minimum of 12-18 seconds before the Hard-disk should actually load Work Bench.

so you need either new 3.1 roms with as much in it as you can fir OR an eFlash for your Amiga

flash ROM (features)

  • 1 or 2 MB 32 bit flash ROM
    allows storage of software which are run at startup of the Amiga - initialization of PCI cards, booting from USB mass storage devices, etc.
  • cannot remap the Kickstart ROM
  • reprogrammable up to 100.000 times - with a command line utility
  • 20 year data-retention
  • switch for deactivating the card at boot time
  • program selector switch allows starting a different batch of programs from flash memory
  • write protection against unwanted reprogramming


although another option would be a DENEB as this will also give you

  • 48 MBit FlashROM (4 MB for USB stack, 2 MB for firmware and installation software)
    • ROM can be switched off by jumper (ROMOFF jumper)
    • no media for installation needed (installation possible on diskless systems)
    • USB available from cold boot: USB devices can be used as boot device, HID devices are usable in Early Startup Menu
    • firmware updates
so smart money would be on the DENEB pending prices for the eFlash =)

there is a Zorro2 KickFlash (1MB)


there might be some more FlashROM adapters - but that's all I can find at the moment.
 
Sweet!

to for you to read the manual me thinks =D
 
Aghhhhh! I hate manuals. :)

Well its either that, or you can send me your DENEB for installation in my A4000 so I can tell you how AWESOME it is =)

:readit: RTFM =D

if you get stuck, try sounding out the words... I do all the time =)
 
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