Richard Norman sent EMail with comments on several topics. He writes, <i>Regarding the A1000 and 14.4K modems, I installed one on my friend's A1000 running 1.3. We took a "normal" cable, and looked at the Amiga manual and clipped the wires that it said shouldn't be used. Works great!<i>
Interleave Questions and Intermittent Errors on a SCSI System
Mr. Norman also asked about his friend's C Ltd. controller and 50 MB Okidata 570 hard drive. <i> He is having intermittent R/W errors . He's also using the C Ltd. external 1 MB ram card (can this be expanded beyond 1 MB by changing to denser chips?) He's not sure all the driver software is the latest version. We did a low-level format using an interleave of 6, which gave us the fastest low-level format time. We tried high-level format interleaves of 6, 1 and 0. No matter what the interleave, we were only getting about 87K per second throughput, less than the 150K promised in the manual. Does anybody know the best interleaves for this hardware? He's using the ACB4000 driver software, which the manual states is for the C Ltd. Adaptec 4000 MFM-SCSI controller. However it was stated to be a 50 MB system, which required RLL mode and the ACB4070 driver software to be used, and presumably, the C Ltd. Adaptec 4070 RLL-SCSI controller. We have no idea which number controller he has, but we do need to get the ACB4070.device driver. He's looking for others with C Ltd. controllers, and leads on where to contact the developers for advice. He also needs the right driver.device.
Another symptom he's having is that whole drawers and subdirectories from one partition are being duplicated on the other two partitions. I initially thought he was making some sort of mistake, but I have verified that these "cloned" files re-appear by themselves! I can delete them, but in a few days, the files from that one partition (one containing the highest cylinders) wind up copied onto his other two partitions. <i>
Amiga Networking Information
Mr. Norman also commented about networking on the Amiga. He comments, <i> I thought you and Mr. Everett Greene might like a copy of my Amiga Networking FAQ. You can download it from Aminet in the docs/help directory.
Mr. Greene may or may not know that the Commodore networking products were sold to various third party vendors. Envoy from IAM is the Amiga-to-Amiga software that would have been part of 3.1, but was pulled out. Envoy is available now. <i>
David Ferguson of Pontotoc, MS also supplied some information on Amiga Networking. He uses an A2065 ENet card with the AS225 TCP/IP software. They have three Amiga systems running 10Base2 Thin ENet. He noted that with help from their system administrator, they were able to get up and running, even though the process was "a little tricky." While space doesn't allow me to include all of his positive comments on Amiga networking, he notes, <i>I can easily say that networking is virtually invisible to the end-user.<i>
He also notes, <i>Commodore's A2065 has been replaced by the A2066 (available only from CEI) with a 25% performance boost and is A2000/3000(T)/4000(T) compatible. The AmiTCP shareware, ENLAN's DFS and Oxxi's Novell networking software is said to be compatible with the A2065/2066 ENet cards. The ASDG LanRover will not work with the AS225 TCP/IP software but is SANA-II compliant. Interwork's ENLAN networking software does work with the LanRover.<i>
A Scary Backup Story
Harry Runge sent EMail with a very long description of his scary experience with Quarterback 6.0. I edited the letter heavily due to space limitations. He writes, <i> What follows is an anomaly and a truly scary one. It has to do with QuarterBack 6.0. First, let me describe my setup and system. The system is an A1000 modified with the Rejuvenator and the CSA Derringer 25MHz/68030 boards. Ram total is 6.5 MB with the 2 MB Agnus and 2 MB 32 bit in the Derringer. There are two HD's, Quantum 52 LPS and Quantum 170 ELS. They are divided into six partitions, four on the '170 (contains the boot partition) and two on the '52. Four floppy drives consist of three 3.5's and one 5.25 make up the rest of the Drives' configuration. DOS Version is 2.1.
The drives are named SupraDrive0-6 (DH0: - DH6:) with '5 and '6 occupying the Quantum 52. DH5 and DH6 at the time were 15 MB and 34 MB respectively. I had installed the virtual memory program swap file on DH5; I sized it at 10 MB which left 5 MB unused. I decided to reconfigure the drive to 10 MB for DH5 and the rest, 39 MB, for DH6. There was only 12 MB to backup and restore. Using QuarterBack 6.0, the backup took 12 floppies in all.
After warm rebooting, I started QBack 6, selected DH6 and hit 'Restore'. It started reading the 'Catalog'; after a few seconds, it popped a requester saying that the catalog was corrupted. After I elected to continue, the listing stalled out about halfway. I clicked the 'Proceed' button and everything locked up immediately. I warm booted and tried again. This time, the listing stalled out at a different place.
I tried the alternate catalog with the same erratic results. I tried the New Horizons support number and got a recording. I tried DiskSalv 2 and Recover unsuccessfully. Then I tried QBack 5 and 5.02; both of those versions exited before I even got to the 'Proceed' phase.
Next the thought occurred that backups of the other drive's partitions might also have problems. Running QBack 6 once more, I hit 'Restore' for DH0. This backup set was also corrupt! Next I loaded up V 5.02 and backed up DH0. That done, I powered down, waited at least a minute and powered up. After all had settled down, I ran through the 'Restore' for DH0. It read the entire catalog without problem.
That completed, I gave QBack 6 another go. This time I made a copy of the original program disk and started with that. Hitting the 'Restore' button, this time it read through the full catalog without error. I punched 'Proceed'. The first four were Icon files which popped the requester. The program proceeded to recover the remaining files just as if nothing had ever happened. I zapped the four corrupt Icon files with new ones. Next I reinstalled QBack 6 on DH0 and did a backup on DH6. After shutting down for several minutes, I powered up and ran QBack 6 'Restore' on DH6. Although just restoring a few files, those with the originally corrupt icons, the program functioned flawlessly.<i>
Mr. Runge speculated on several reasons why he might have had the problem in the first place. He notes that he had compressed QBack 6 with Imploder. He also suggests there might be some obscure bug in QBack 6. He mentioned the August '94 Bug Bytes column which describes a similar problem. He also lives in an area of frequent electric power interruptions. His last speculation was the possibility of an obscure virus. He concluded his letter with some very good advice, <i>After doing a backup, check the 'Restore' function to determine if you have a valid backup.<i>
Workbench 2.1 floppy errors
Pat Fish sent EMail with questions about floppy access on an A1000 running 2.04 KickStart and WorkBench 2.1. He writes, <i> I have 8.5 MB of RAM and a 130 MB HD.
Under 2.04 and above I notice that multitasking isn't as smooth or reliable as it was under 1.3. Particularly during simultaneous serial IO and floppy writes. Worse, the floppies no longer seem reliable. Both OFS and FFS floppies are unreliable. Often write/read errors are given. When dragging icons to the floppies, a requester often pops up with the ambiguous message:
Error while copying 'filename'
Error 20
Remove incomplete object?
Note that the disk for this example was only 48% full and the file being copied was only 78K and plenty of room was left.
When copying via the Shell, it says:
6.Ram Disk:> copy 2.1:Trek/Yar df0:
Error writing df0:Yar
Remove incomplete destination file? y
Destination file "df0:Yar" removed
Continue after error? y<i>
Pat wonders if anyone has any suggestions for him.
Mega Midget Racer and the MegaChip.
Greg Bastow sent EMail with some suggestions for topics discussed in the August 1994 Bug Bytes. He writes, <i> John Warren was inquiring about getting a MegaChip (by DKB) working in s Amiga 500. I don't specifically have a solution for him, but I did notice that he does only have a 512k of chip ram. He should attempt the 512k to 1 MB Agnus upgrade. By running a program like SysInfo by Nick Wilson (Shareware) you can determine which Agnus he actually has. If he has an 8372, then a couple of simple changes to the motherboard will enable the other 512k of ram as Chip Ram. If he has a 8370/8371 then he will have to purchase a newer Agnus chip (8372 or 8375 will both work).
As far as moving the MegaChip using cabling, that would be inadvisable. The current MegaChip's are small daughter cards that plug directly into the Agnus socket, and trying to alter this method can cause problem with the chips. <i>
Ami-Back and High Density Drive
Mr. Bastow also commented on the high density drive issue and Ami-Back. <i> I believe the problem you are experiencing is general fault with how Ami-Back (and every other such program I have ever tried) deal with floppies.
When you first run Ami-Back it goes out, and send a GetGeometry() command to all the devices it can find. When you run Ami-Back with 2 low density disks in those high density drives, this command will not return HIGHDENSITY. The simplest solution is to have 2 high density disks in the drives when you first start Ami-Back.
I am hoping in the upcoming V3.0 of Ami-Back, the boys at Intelligent Designs (new company name, formally Moonlighter Software - same programmers) will allow a "Refresh Device" command, so you don't have to quit the program and restart it because you forgot to put a HD disk in the drive.<i>
Problems with Reason Under Workbench 2.1
From Stockholm, Sweden, Dr. Claes-Gustaf Nordquist, sent E-mail with a problem when using his grammar checker. He writes, <i>I have a problem with the grammar checker program Reason from Two Guys, for my Amiga. I recently upgraded my computer with a 33 MHz 68030 with MMU and a FPU and 12 MB of RAM. My system also has an 85 MB hard drive, an X-drive, a modem, a printer and a scanner. I also upgraded to WB 2.1. Since then, Reason can not be run from the hard drive. It works from floppy though, and it worked fine on WB 2.0 without the accelerator. English is not my native language and I need the program to check what I write in English. To work it from floppy is also a nuisance.<i>
It sounds like something in the new startup-sequence is causing the problem. You might try temporarily removing items from the startup and test the program. Of course, some startup commands may be necessary to make sure all of your other applications work correctly. If you find an offending application, you will have to decide which you value most, or disable one while you run your grammar checking tasks. How about it readers? Any other suggestions?
Mathieeedoubbas Revisited
Hernan Rodrigo Eguiluz of Argentina (no city given) writes with a suggestion on locating a compatible version of SetPatch. He comments, <i>There is a version of SetPatch in the Frozen Fish CD-ROM. It is located in the BBS/MAR94/DEV/MISC/ directory and it's called setpatch.lha. In it's documentation, the aforementioned problem is cited explicitly. After using it in my Amiga 1200, the guru haven't come up any more.
That's all for this month. If you have any workarounds or bugs to report, or if you know of any upgrades to commercial software, you may notify me by writing to:
John Steiner
c/o Amazing Computing
Box 2140
Fall River, MA 02722
...or leave EMail to
John Steiner on Portal
73075,1735 on CompuServe
Internet mail can be sent to
John_Steiner@cup.portal.com
FAX John Steiner at (701)280-0764
(8:30 A.M. to 5:30 P.M. Central time, Monday-Friday)
