Path: utzoo!utgpu!utstat!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!ucbvax!decwrl!sun!pitstop!sundc!seismo!uunet!mcvax!ukc!etive!hwcs!zen!frank
From: frank@zen.co.uk (Frank Wales)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga
Subject: Re: flakey amigas
Summary: hmmm
Message-ID: <1517@zen.UUCP>
Date: 20 Feb 89 16:57:33 GMT
References: <2909@hplabsz.HPL.HP.COM>
Reply-To: frank@zen.co.uk (Frank Wales)
Organization: Zengrange Limited, Leeds, England
Lines: 47

In article <2909@hplabsz.HPL.HP.COM> dleigh@hplabsz.UUCP (Darren Leigh) writes:
>[...] my brand new B2000 should work just fine.  It
>doesn't.  I keep reading about people who keep their machine on for
>days at a time without rebooting: I'm lucky if I can run mine for a
>couple of hours before it gurus on me.  Sometime's it's only a matter
>of 15 minutes or so.
>
>I keep getting guru number 00000003's and some 00000004's.  I realize that the
>machine has no memory protection, but if I run precisely one
>application after rebooting, it shouldn't crash nearly as often.  If
>it only happened when I tested custom programs, I could understand,
>but popular game programs (such as Tetrix and RogerRabbit) do it so
>much that sometimes it seems they are unplayable.
>
>I have a B2000 w/ Commodore 2 Meg expansion, a 2090A running a FFS
>SCSI drive, 1.3 ROMS and a Flicker-fixer.  Nothing weird, as you see.

Well, my brand new B2000 seems to be having similar trouble.  It ran
fine until I put a GVP controller with ST277N drive into the machine.
[There are no other cards plugged in.]  It wouldn't format any
partitions larger than about 260 cylinders, getting that far then
hanging [once it gurued #03] -- it didn't matter whether the partition
was first, last or somewhere in the middle.  About 25% of the time, it
hung at boot, whether or not there was a bootable system on the hard
disk, and whether or not there was a boot disk in the floppy.  After a
variable amount of time during a session, it stopped talking to the hard
drive, although the rest of the system seemed to work fine.  This was
with the controller in the rightmost slot, with the front of the
machine facing you.  I moved it to the next slot, and now, although none
of these problems have recurred, certain software packages don't work
right; one game won't restart, hanging the machine instead, while
another gurus at start up (#03 again); a utility gets confused about which
drive it's talking to.   Now, I don't mean to be picky :-),
but I'd like to know exactly what the problem is so that I can have it
fixed and get myself a reliable machine.

For example, can anyone confirm that the Zorro bus slots are pin-for-pin
identical?  If they are, then it would be hard to believe that
the GVP card is at fault, since its behaviour changes dependent on the
slot it's in.  [I haven't tried it in any of the other slots yet, but
then, I don't believe it shouldn't make a blind bit of difference.]

[btw, GVP autoboots, FFS, WB1.3, KS 1.3]

--
Frank Wales, Systems Manager,        [frank@zen.co.uk<->mcvax!zen.co.uk!frank]
Zengrange Ltd., Greenfield Rd., Leeds, ENGLAND, LS9 8DB. (+44) 532 489048 x217