vanam@pttesac.UUCP (04/17/87)
I just wanted to report on the status of my C-Ltd 20 Meg hard disk. I bought one at the Commodore show in S.F. about a month ago. That one quickly went bad and I sent it to C-Ltd for repair. It came back about 2 weeks later with a note that a bad PAL chip had been fixed in the controller. Well within a few days the drive went bad again. I sent it back again after calling them. I convinced them to send me a different unit so that if the same identical thing happened again, I could suspect my Amiga or C-Ltd AMega RAM. I was dissapointed with the speed with which they sent me the new unit. I suspect they spent some time trying to repair my old unit before bothering to send me the new one. After I spent $40 of my money to send the thing back to them for the 2nd time, I expected them to send me a new unit the same day. After waiting a week, I called. I was told that they had trouble finding a new unit to send to me. Hmmm. Anyway a few days later, I did get a new unit. This one works! No fatal errors yet. No lost data yet. There was a problem with a superbase demo on this disk. The demo worked OK on the first drive I had (while the drive was still working), but on this new one, I would get a guru everytime I tried to run the demo. Finally I tried deleting the entire drawer. From then on the hard drive would take about 6 minutes extra to boot. I could hear it doing something (trying to fix itself?) and my startup-sequence would seem to hang. Eventually everything would come up and I could read everything on the hard disk OK, but I couldn't write on it. It would always say "DH0: not validated". Doing an "info" command would show that DH0: was always still being validated. I finally reformatted the entire drive and partitioned it into 4 sections (I had wanted to partition it eventually anyway). Formatting found 0 errors (a pleasant surprise). I haven't had any "not validated" or unexplained guru's since. I only have 2 things (not very fatal) that still seem to happen. I have been getting a kind of locked up condition about every 4 hours of use. Rebooting has so far always brought everything back. Another thing that is wrong is that I get this streaking jibberish on the screen when running "oing" or "instant music". I suspect the same thing will happen with a lot of games, but I don't do games much. I saw the same trouble in a local store here when they first connected up a hard disk in addition to expanded memory. When I say every 4 hours of use, I mean heavy use. I'm usually typing a lot and fairly fast. As a matter of fact, sometimes I think the lockup condition happens when I'm doing a lot of type-ahead. Not sure about that yet. I guess I could try some of Fred Fish'es tricks like adding special grounding or replacing my 68000 with a ceramic and/or faster version. Anyone know what that streaking stuff is? Despite the problems I'm still happy having a hard disk. I never had one before. I love not having to constantly swap floppies. And the thing is fast enough that I don't have to put everything in ASDG-RAM:. I still need to work on backups. It looks like Fred's backup utility may be just what I need. I've just barely started playing with it. Marnix
rokicki@rocky.STANFORD.EDU (Tomas Rokicki) (04/18/87)
In article <411@pttesac.UUCP>, vanam@pttesac.UUCP (Marnix van Ammers) writes: > I just wanted to report on the status of my C-Ltd 20 Meg > hard disk. I thought I'd do the same. About two weeks ago I had an Amiga with an Amega board, and nothing else. Everything worked fine and dandy. I sent CLTD a check for $1600, for a 50 Meg Hard drive. About ten days later, I got a big UPS package. I removed my CLTD card, plugged in the disk, and booted; the hard drive would not come up. The machine always locked in the first reference to DH0:. So I sent it back, after calling them and telling them that I was shipping it air, and wanted my second drive shipped air. (The original was shipped ground.) In my depression about getting a bad drive, I purchased and installed the KickRAM. I highly recommend it; it works like a charm. But, with it, my Amega board no longer works. (I know how to fix it; the instructions are in the KickRAM docs; you simply replace a resistor and capacitor on the reset generation circuitry.) I was so busy writing BlitLab for the BADGE meeting that I haven't get around to fixing the memory board yet. Well, Thursday (the day of BADGE) I got another package, my new hard drive! I plugged it in; everything seems to be working like a charm. And I exercised that drive. I moved every single picture from all of the fish disks and FAUG disks into a directory, created a huge dpslide.cmd, and let her run for four hours. No problem. Next, I moved all of the TeX source onto the drive, and recompiled TeX *twice* while kermit'ing some stuff from the hard disk down to another Machine. At the same time, I was diskcopying some floppies for a friend. No problems at all yet. And I've got the disk 31% full. (Remember, this is a 50 meg drive.) I also did some development on the machine. Let me tell you, having that drive makes my Amiga an entirely new computer. Compilation and TeX is faster than on a 750 with no one else on. Everything is faster than shit. I can recompile TeX fast enough to where I can now *experiment* with the program. I love the drive. So today I'm tearing into and fixing the Amega card. (By the way, if you have the Amega card and order a hard drive from CLTD, make sure you also order the APTB (Amiga Pass Through Board) to connect the two; I didn't and had to wait a few days for it.) Then I'm going to put everything back together, and put a few more megabytes of stuff on the drive. I just got 3.40a from Manx, yesterday, so I'm going to recompile TeX and everything else again to see if they work. (It was pleasant seeing that they've included my profiler and my setenv routines in the new stuff.) And I'll keep everyone posted. -tom
page@ulowell.cs.ulowell.edu (Bob Page) (04/22/87)
vanam@pttesac.UUCP (Marnix van Ammers) wrote in article <411@pttesac.UUCP>: > I just wanted to report on the status of my C-Ltd 20 Meg > hard disk. rokicki@rocky.STANFORD.EDU (Tomas Rokicki) wrote in article <249@rocky.STANFORD.EDU>: >I sent CLTD a check for $1600, for a 50 Meg Hard drive. I was talking to a guy who also has the CLtd 50M hard drive. He said that although it came as one partition, he broke it into six 8M partitions which made it a lot faster (due to the smaller bitmaps that AmigaDOG has to wade through). He suggested I partition my 20M drive into four 5M sections to increase the speed. Has anyone done this? Have you done any benchmarks before/after? ..Bob PS This guy is also trying to get a Bernoulli Box (removable 20M disk) to talk to the CLtd controller. I guess the BBox wants a certain format that CLtd's 'scsiformat' program doesn't provide, but CLtd told him that other people have succeeded in formatting the disk on the PC and then using Amiga's FORMAT to format it for AmigaDOS. He tried this and it didn't work either. Anybody had any success with this? -- Bob Page, U of Lowell CS Dept. page@ulowell.{uucp,edu,csnet}
alex@clwyd.uucp (Alex Laney) (04/23/87)
In article <411@pttesac.UUCP> vanam@pttesac.UUCP writes: > >..... Another thing that is wrong is that I get this streaking >jibberish on the screen when running "oing" or "instant music". >I suspect the same thing will happen with a lot of games, but >I don't do games much. I saw the same trouble in a local store >here when they first connected up a hard disk in addition to >expanded memory. > I have gotten vertical 'streaking' from a Basic program, that I typed in from Compute! magazine. (the Banner program from a recent issue) I have no 'extra' hardware other than a 256K expansion. So it is not a Chip vs. Fast Ram issue for me. I would like to know what is causing it! I suspect Basic (v1.1) though. Mind you the Banner program is pretty minimal, so I doubt I'll use it again. (With all the Basic games on Fish disks and available in magazines, I have gotten to know Amiga Basic, and I think it is a quantum leap better than 90% of home computer Basics, but I still feel like I'm slumming) ... Alex Laney, Condition: Headache Employer: Xios Systems Corp, 150-1600 Carling Av, Ottawa, Ontario Disclaimer: none of the contents of this are approved by Xios Net: {utcsri,utzoo}!dciem!nrcaer!xios!alexl == alexl@xios.UUCP {utcsri,utzoo}!dciem!nrcaer!xios!clwyd!alex == alex@clwyd.XIOS.UUCP Quote: "Who sent you.. the sissies at Delmore Catering?" - TCM2 Next new address: alex@xicom.UUCP ... xios!xicom!alex
cmcmanis@sun.UUCP (04/23/87)
In article <1207@ulowell.cs.ulowell.edu>, (Bob Page) writes: > > I was talking to a guy who also has the CLtd 50M hard drive. He said > that although it came as one partition, he broke it into six 8M partitions > which made it a lot faster (due to the smaller bitmaps that AmigaDOG > has to wade through). He suggested I partition my 20M drive into > four 5M sections to increase the speed. > > Has anyone done this? Have you done any benchmarks before/after? > > ..Bob I talked to a guy from Supra who said they partitioned their drives because on the Atari "you have to." Personally, I don't think he was very well informed nor do I think partitioning helps the 40 folder bug on the ST's. Anyway on one's Amiga there are no such restrictions on how big a disk you want to add. Due to the hashed directories searching for a file is relative only to the number of files in a directory and the number of layers 'deep' it is. So partitioning your drive on an Amiga does make it faster but not for the reason Bob mentions (ie bitmap size). There are actually two ways that you win here. First, when there is a problem with the drive and it has to be 'validated' it takes longer on a bigger drive because it has to go look at *every* file on the disk. Fortunately, if the driver that comes with your drive is correctly written then it won't have to do that very often. The second feature is that AmigaDOS always maintains a few blockbuffers for each disk device. This mini-cache which can be increased with the 'addbuffers' command is local to the partition and therefore things like copies and some directory reads can be greatly enhanced. I have a MicroBotics MAS-Drive and have run it as one partition, two partitions, and three partitions. The multipartition case is a wee bit faster in some cases but I haven't noticed and major speedups. -- --Chuck McManis uucp: {anywhere}!sun!cmcmanis BIX: cmcmanis ARPAnet: cmcmanis@sun.com These views are my own and no one elses. They could be yours too, just call MrgCop() and then ReThinkDisplay()!
vanam@pttesac.UUCP (Marnix van Ammers) (04/27/87)
In article <294@xios.XIOS.UUCP> alex@clwyd.UUCP (Alex Laney) writes: >In article <411@pttesac.UUCP> vanam@pttesac.UUCP writes: >> >>..... Another thing that is wrong is that I get this streaking >>jibberish on the screen when running "oing" or "instant music". >I have gotten vertical 'streaking' from a Basic program, that I typed in >from Compute! magazine. (the Banner program from a recent issue) I have >no 'extra' hardware other than a 256K expansion. So it is not a Chip vs. >Fast Ram issue for me. > >I would like to know what is causing it! I suspect Basic (v1.1) though. I have discovered that the streaking I've been experiencing was not due to my hard disk but to the use of the morerows program. I am now quite happy. If I really want to play a game, I restore my devs:system-configuration file with a non-morerows version and reboot. That reminds me. Does anyone have a program that will allow changing the morerows setting in the system-configuration file or the printers setting in the system-configuration file without running preferences and without rebooting (to change morerows) ?