4.1 fe long boot process

[nbache]

I am guessing that ports 0 and 1 are primary masters and ports 2 and 3 are slaves.

With SATA, there are no masters or slaves, all disks are equal.

Best regards,

Niels

[Interrogative]

I am guessing that ports 0 and 1 are primary masters and ports 2 and 3 are slaves.

With SATA, there are no masters or slaves, all disks are equal.

Best regards,

Niels

Well, Niels, that is what I would have thought. Yet, having read the documentation (SYS:Documentation/IDE/sii3114ide_dev.doc)...

- sii3114ide_conf

Compose 4 chars (pri master, pri slave, sec master, sec slave) using :

0 : nothing
1 : harddisk
2 : dvd/cdrom reader or burner

Default : if you don't set this envvar, sii3114ide will scan the IDE buses and
try to determine the configuration by itself.

The driver treats the SATA card like a regular IDE card with primary, secondary, master, and slave configurations. What I've been trying to figure out is what ports are considered primary, secondary, masters, and slaves by the driver. Once I have that figured out, I can correctly set up my drives on the card and the sii3114ide_conf. As said in the documentation...

- Using sii3114ide_conf (properly set !) saves need for timeouts for drive
detection at boot time.

One more problem is that setting maxbus doesn't seem to do anything. UBoot still scans all four ports timing out on ports 1 and 3.

At this point, I'm thinking of getting a two port card. I looked in their documentation and found that they are not fully functional either. So, between the 3114, 3112, and 3512, which is the most compatible with the SAM460ex? At present, it seems the onboard SATA functions best, but it is limited to PIO modes.

[Spectre660]

The 3512 works best.
Just tried a 3114 and the delays were not too bad but the time out output messages are ugly .

[nbache]

With SATA, there are no masters or slaves, all disks are equal.

(SYS:Documentation/IDE/sii3114ide_dev.doc)...

- sii3114ide_conf

Compose 4 chars (pri master, pri slave, sec master, sec slave) using :

I'm pretty sure that is just a copy/paste thing from the docs of the ide drivers it was built upon. But of course I am not a developer and don't have access to the source.

Best regards,

Niels

[Interrogative]

I received my sii3512 card today. After putting the card in, I set the UBoot boot devices to 3X12 DVD and 3x12 HD. I exited to a prompt and deleted the sii3114ide stuff using setenv/saveenv. I then tried to boot. I had no timeouts. Yehaw! It screamed through the kickstart kmods. Yehaw! Then it hanged on the AmigaOS4.1 boot picture. Crap!

I put the AmigaOS4.1 FE CDROM in the DVD drive and rebooted. It again hanged on the boot picture. I reset and held both mouse buttons in during boot. In the early startup, I selected boot with no startup sequence so that I could enter a shell and eventually get MediaToolbox running... no such luck. It again hanged on the boot picture, not allowing me to go any further. I tried booting from the SDCard... same problem. I took the 3512 out and reinstalled it in case it wasn't making contact. When I rebooted... hang on boot picture. I thought the 3512 was going to make life easier?! Oh, well.

Is there anything I have to set up in order to use the 3512? I read through the docs and did not find anything special. As of now, I am back to using the 3114 with it's long timeouts. I'm about to go back to using my sii0680. It might be PATA, but at least it is fast and reliable.

Any help would be appreciated.

Edit: I tried installing the 3512 with a riser card. The system booted up to the splash picture and hanged as usual. I left it alone for a long while, then workbench appeared. The disk LED was showing constant activity and the pointer rarely moved. This reminded me of something I read over on Amigans.net from tonyw

Yes, I've had one die on me only a few days ago. The boot process seemed to freeze, but left to itself, it would complete after half an hour or so. The card seemed to be continuously interrupting while ever a HD was connected to it.

Once the system was up, I could move the mouse, but nothing would seem to change for about a minute, when the mouse pointer would jerk on the screen. You can imagine how long it took to type a command on the console.

Replacing the card fixed the problem, but it *could* have been just the act of unplugging the card and replugging the new one. I didn't recheck the old one after satisfying myself that it was the fault of the card.

In other words, my newly bought 3512 is dying. If I was to get another one, it might just work. Time to send this one back.

[Steady]

Hey Interrogative.

Have you tried actually setting sii3114ide_conf to the expected values? I have a 3114 too and I thought this would work to skip the long device check. I'll try tonight.

[Interrogative]

Good day Steady,

I have tried various configurations of nvsetvar sii3114ide_conf. No matter how I've set it, or to what ports I 've attached the drives, I've had timeouts. I'm getting somewhat used to it now. It may take a long time to get past the UBoot screen, but my disk speed is blazing fast once it boots up.

Let me know how you have your 3114 is set up and whether you have timeouts, or how long those timeouts are.

Thank you,

[Interrogative]

The company that sold me the 3512 said that they had tested it and found it to be in working order.

I did some more research on the web. After reading that the 3512 had problems with Seagate drives, I decided to try the 3512 without my Amiga HD (a Western Digital HD mind you) attached. I put the HD SATA lead to the motherboard, and the DVD lead to the 3512. It booted fine. I could access the DVD drive fine. I put the OS 4.1 FE CDROM in and rebooted. It hanged at the splash picture. I waited. I waited some more. It never got to the Workbench. I rebooted without anything in the DVDRW, and it booted. I turned off the SAM and attached the NTFS drive (a Seagate HD) to the 3512 alongside the DVDRW. I tried to boot. Even though it was booting from the motherboard SATA2 port, it hanged during the splash screen. I think my particular 3512 doesn't like either AmigaOS, or DMA... or Western Digitals and Seagates... whatever the case...

I'm sending the 3512 back.

[Steady]

I couldn't get the delays to stop either.

I have a 3114 with a DVD and HDD plugged into the end of the card (as opposed to the connectors along the top). I originally plugged them in the top because it was easy to get to but they were not recognised with that configuration.

[Interrogative]

I'd like to check one more thing concerning the long SATA initialization process during UBoot. While researching the SIL 3114, I noticed various people had problems depending on what BIOS the card was using (SATALink, RAID0, RAID5, etc.). What BIOS would work best with the UBoot driver and the AmigaOS4.1 FE driver?