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From: greg@cica.cica.indiana.edu (Gregory TRAVIS)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga.hardware
Subject: More info on A2091 woes
Message-ID: <9696@cica.cica.indiana.edu>
Date: 14 Jan 91 18:08:42 GMT
Reply-To: greg@cica.indiana.edu (Gregory TRAVIS)
Organization: IU Center for Innovative Computing, Bloomington IN
Lines: 41

My (new, yea!) local Commodore dealer just called me back with some
information she finally got out of Commodore Tech support regarding
the awful A2091 controller.  Now, don't take this as gospel but the
dealer said that Commodore has a chip upgrade availavble now
for $34.70 that fixes problems with certain 3rd party software.  Now,
I've never had that problem.  My problem is that I STILL cannot use
an external drive with the A2091 using Commodore's driver
software.

For those of you who are unfamiliar with the problem, if you try and
hook more than one drive to the 2091, all will appear OK until something
goes out there and hammers on both drives simultaneously.  At that
point the system will hang waiting on the controller which has
failed.  Commodore will attempt to drag a red-herring in front of you by
claiming that the drive you're using does not conform to SCSI specs.
This is a blatant lie as I have hooked two Quantum P40s (as orginally
shipped from Commodore) to my machine and seen the lock-up.  I've also
demonstrated the problem with a wide variety of other drives (Miniscribe,
Maxtor, CDC wren) that we use routinely around the lab here on other
machines without problems.

Commodore tech support indicated to my dealer that they were working
on the problem but a fix would not be available for some time.

Just to cross-check, I called CPU (the dealer from whom I bought the
machine a year ago) up in Indianapolis and they had the same story.

My local dealer said they called because they were having trouble with
external SCSI devices (CD-ROM) attached to an A2091 controller.

I would strongly advise people to REFUSE TO BUY any system with the
A2091 unless it's thrown in free.  This controller was garbage when it
was designed years ago and continues to be garbage to this day.




-- 
Gregory R. Travis                Indiana University, Bloomington IN 47405
greg@cica.cica.indiana.edu       Center for Innovative Computer Applications
Disclaimer:  Everything I say is true and I never lie.