nealet@syma.sussex.ac.uk (Neale Type) (02/07/91)
help please! I own the following equipment: Amiga A2000 revision 4.0 motherboard 2090 controller (early, non-autoboot version) 2 x ST-506 hard drives SupraRAM 2000 with 8 mb, diagnostics fine. After plugging in the Supra card my hard disk didn't work. The binddrivers command fails, and subsequently AmigaDOS insists that the hard drives are not DOS disks. I have tried positioning the cards in many different slots (no effect) and changing the amount of RAM on the Supra board (no effect) If I disable the Supra card using NoFastMem until binddrivers has run, then the disks come up fine. After this any disk access results in file corruption, and eventually bad sectors on the disk. I figured that the Supra card is simply not compatible with my current setup. When I sent the card back to the dealer with a note saying this and requesting a refund, I was informed that there would be a 25% re-stocking charge for the return of goods, as according to the supplier they are not *faulty*. What I need is supporting evidence of failure, to convince the dealer... a) Has anyone *any* information on failures caused by the Supra RAM card ? b) Has anyone managed to get it working in an A2000/2090 (rev 4.0) (*HOW*) I would really appreciate some help/replies on this so I can bring the dealer back into touch with reality. Please e-mail me and not waste space on the net. thanx. -- ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Neale Type , Computing Service /// | *UK 1990 Kickoff Champion * University of Sussex, Falmer \\\/// | nealet @ syma.sussex.ac.uk England. BN1 9QH \X// | ccfe7 @ cluster.sussex.ac.uk
d37630m@kaira.hut.fi (Mika Ilmaranta) (02/07/91)
I'd say the trouble is that SupraRAM-card doesn't have DMA support and therefore a2090 controller which is a DMA controller tries to transfer data to this RAM with drastic consequents. The solution to this problem is to set the Mask= option in your devs:mountlist so that a2090 won't try to use Supra's RAM. You just found an other way to accomplish this by using NoFastMem, since no Fast mem is available the buffers are allocated in Chip/Slow mem. Ofcourse thisway you can't get the best transfer speed with your a2090, but is't the only way it works with Supra's 'lame' RAM card. -- What we need is AMIGA compatible hard- and software ^^^^^^^^^^ What bug? It's an undocumented feature! - Mika Ilmaranta - - ilmis@niksula.hut.fi -
rshaw@theborg.mlb.fl.us (Ron) (02/09/91)
The Supra Controller uses a different configuration. You will have to reformat your harddrive under supra's format program (which should automatically recognize the type of harddrive you have). Now I would suggest removing (semi-colon in front of the bind drivers command, since if you have any harddrive device lib in the expansions dir it will mount your drive under that one. (which may be your problem if you have it formatted for that particular drive). Boot from Supra boot & allow the supra software to come up, It will ask you (when it sees your hardrive) if you want to re-format it. Select yes and it will continue on from there. Supra has one of the best workbench type interfaces for formatting/ partioning harddrive (well in the past) Ron Shaw..... The only good 8 bit computer is a Dead 8 bit compter.... -----------------------------Mathematics is a state of mind, Electronics is a state of being.