GVP A530 / A500 questions

[Gyromite]

Hi all,

I am trying to get a newly installed 40 mhz GVP A530 w/ 4 gig CF working on my Amiga 500. I need to format it, but can't get around this issue. If I have turbo off on the GVP, the WB 1.3 loads fine and I am able to get into FaastPrep but the format options are grayed out. With Turbo on at the start, the GVP takes control and of course nothing loads. When I switch to Turbo on in while in WB 1.3, I get a Guru meditation. How can I get my CF formatted?

Thanks

 

[Gyromite]

A bit of digging, it looks as if I need to use Winuae to format it. I'll give that a try.

 

[AndyLandy]

You should be able to do it from just the Amiga. It might take a while for the Amiga to time out from trying to boot the unformatted HD, but it should eventually get there. If you don't have much joy with Faastprep, you can use HDInstTools instead, it's available from Aminet.

On the other hand, you could just set it up in WinUAE and be done with.

 

[Gyromite]

You are correct, the GVP SHOULD timeout, but the problem I think was it was a 4 GB CF card. I think the A500 or GVP was so baffled at what to do with a 4 GB partition that it locked up. So, after using HDTools in WinUAE, I now have 3 partitions, one bootable w/ 300 meg and the other two divided equally. Now the GVP DOES get bypassed to my floppy and I am able to load WB 1.3. Problem now is I just have the GVP install disk which is different from a utilities disk that installs the boot program to the CF. I found the DMS on a website so once I figure a way to get it on a floppy, I should be homefree... hopefully.

I'll keep you posted.

 

[Zetr0]

@Gyromite

Hello there, it does seem you are struggling a bit, since I have one of these units lets see if I can perhaps help =)

Firstly I would humbly recomemnd that you change your Workbench and Kickstart to 3.1 as this will offer much better file-systems (more on this in a bit)

Firstly some limitations - the GVP controller Faaaast prep has issues and reports erronus values with harddisks greater than 3GB. The way around this is not to use Faaaaaast prep.

Instead we need to slightly modify HDToolsBox or HDInstallTools, to prepare the drive - you will need to edit the icon information, and replace the line

SCSI_DEVICE = scsi.device

to

SCSI_DEVICE = gvpscsi.device

This will allow HDToolsBox/HDInstall Tools to see, setup and partiton the drive on the local machine.

Now, heres the limitation bit, any partition that is larger that 3.67GB wont be mounted and any partition that spans past that wont be mounted ethier and you wont be able to access these paritions. (this is using FFS under Kickstart 3.1)

I would humbly suggest that you only configure and use 3.5GB of your Harddisk untill you get a more advanced file system on there (see PFS3 as this supports the humble 68k moto)

Now, you have done most of the hard work in WinUAE so if you configured a correct boot partition in WinUAE, installed your workbench disks onto it then you should be home free already.

what happens when you try and boot from Harddisk?

 

[Gyromite]

Firstly I would humbly recomemnd that you change your Workbench and Kickstart to 3.1 as this will offer much better file-systems (more on this in a bit)

Interesting. I didn't know there was a 3.1 Rom available for the A500. Will that allow me to play AGA games as well as not lose any functionality for the older A500 games and programs? It'd be another $35 or so, but that will remain an option. Thanks!

Firstly some limitations - the GVP controller Faaaast prep has issues and reports erronus values with harddisks greater than 3GB. The way around this is not to use Faaaaaast prep.

NOW you tell me.. lol. FaaastPrep wiped out the entire paritition when I tryed to use it. I'm going to have to start over when I have time. One question though. The MaxTransfer setting would not take when I changed it to the recommended value (don't have that value with me right now). It would default back to the original value. Did you have that problem? And thanks. I will make 3 partitions utilizing only 3.5 gig next time. Now to find a way to get HDToolsBox on a floppy...

 

[Zetr0]

@Gyromite

Hello there Amigo,


Kickstart 3.1

Now, Kickstart 3.1 wont allow you to play AGA games unfortunetely, but it does have better a better filesystem for your harddisk, as well as updated libraries that your Amiga Uses.

you may loose a little functionality with some very-old software -but when we setup your harddisk we can get most of that back with the use of WHDLoad.


Setting up an IDE hard disk for USE under SCSI

Firstly dont worry about the MAXTRANSFERS, this only affected IDE controllers on the Amiga, SCSI controllers ignore this data.

Now I would most humbly recommend PFS3 (you can download this from Aminet by clicking the link), Have a good read of the read-me docs... its well worth it. this will improve not only speed, but the partition sizes you can have on your disks.

In the mean time, you can set the device (cf card) up using OFS (Original File System) under WinUAE - do you know how?