Just to make sure, I am wondering if I have correctly reset my A1 board to factory specs.

At one time early on when attempting to install OS 4.1 fe on my AmigaOne XE/G4, I had gotten the wrong screen mode for the monitor. I have recovered from that by putting a different card in, but I am wondering if something still exists after what I had done earlier that I do not know about.

So, to clear the settings, I unplugged the power, took out the battery and then shorted out the battery socket with a resister. (I had some instructions that said to put the battery in upside down which results in the battery terminals being shorted out. However, I do have some knowledge of electronics and figured I could get the same result in a more safe way by using a resistor to dissipate any left over electrons floating around in the circuit.)

However, even after doing this, I am still having an issue where I can not boot OS 4.1 fe from the hd, even though it works from the CD and also works if I install OS 4.0 update #4 on the same partition. I do not have any other partitions allocated. Others who have A1 xe/g4 boards have installed without issue.

So I would like to know if there is something that may be missed when resetting the board, that may cause it to freeze after the splash screen fades in?

@nzv58l

Did you install AOS4.1Fe on an new/empty partition?

Maybe some USB/stack issue? Try to disable onboard USB.
Or load WB (with AOS4.1FE installed) to load without Startup-Sequence and just type loadwb to see "plain" WB loaded.

Is your HDD SYS: bootable volume set to 'automount' and 'bootable' (use MediaToolbox)

Last edited by jabirulo on 06-Jul-2015 at 09:05 PM.
Last edited by jabirulo on 06-Jul-2015 at 09:02 PM.
Last edited by jabirulo on 06-Jul-2015 at 08:59 PM.

@nzv58l

in UBoot menu there is a setting to let you go back to factory default.

my guess is that you might have forgotten to add the slb in the RDB of your HD.

alternatively you can plug a serial cable between your A1 and another computer and use a terminal program to monitor the boot process.

@nzv58l

Shorting out the battery socket, or restoring the u-boot firmware sounds a bit extreme... can't you just hold down both mouse buttons when Kickstart is loading then choose to boot without startup-sequence then delete sys:prefs/env-archive/sys/screenmode.prefs (or similar)?

Last edited by danwood on 06-Jul-2015 at 10:33 PM.
Last edited by danwood on 06-Jul-2015 at 10:33 PM.

@danwood

Hold down ctrl to go directly to a shell, same as boot with no startup in the early boot menu.

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@nzv58l

Wrong screen mode could be caused by the settings in your Devs:Monitors/ file. Specially if you're still using the old method. use the monitors tab in screenmode prefs and set it to detect automatically, show only 60hz modes and enable interrupts then save.

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@nzv58l

I'm sure this has been said before, but if you can boot the CD OK, there is nothing wrong with the hardware. You are looking in the wrong place.

The place you should be looking is the software installation on your HDD. However, that is probably beyond repair now. I suggest (again) that you boot from the CD, format the partition and re-install carefully. It will only take you half an hour, max.

Don't forget to install slb-v2 in the RDB of the HD containing the boot partition, as mentioned in a previous post.

After booting from the CD, run a Shell and use "nvgetvar" to check the U-Boot settings. These are important:
Boot1 = [CD]
Boot2 = [HD]

If they need to be changed, use "nvsetvar" to change them.

Sorry, I can't remember what the [CD] and [HD] names should be.

Last edited by tonyw on 07-Jul-2015 at 12:19 AM.

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@tonyw

I have been re-initializing and formatting between trying other things. It seems my board is possessed or something.

The reason why I started this thread was to make sure that I am resetting everything I possibly can to default settings so I can rule any configuration issues out and move on to something else if it doesn't fix the problem.

The strangest thing is that I did actually boot off of this drive under OS 4.1 fe when I created a SWAP partition where I did not have one before, and then after the successful boot, I could never get it to boot again even when I left all the configuration settings from the initial boot alone. I know it is pretty strange. Hyperion is helping me out here though. I think their support is second to none, because my machine is pretty old and these boards do have a lot of problems.

@nzv58l

Just to add some things that I remember. At one point I accidently ran AOS 4.1.x with DMA off for the harddrives and that did for some reason make the system unstable and it would lockup randomly untill I turned it back on.

SmartFileSystem is what I use on all partitions with 512 blocksize.

I thought that it could be good with some comparison since we have the same machine.

Other cards in it not mentioned before is a Radeon 9250 and a SB Live! .

@hotrod

With some help, I finally found out how to get around the issue I had. I had to disable the a1floppy??? device by commenting it out in the kicklayout file. I haven't had enough time to closely analyse it yet, but I know when it is commented out, it boots. Yay!

@nzv58l

It is a good idea to disable on kicklayout, drivers for hardware you are not ussing. As far as I can remember on older versions of 4.1 floppy driver was commented by default.

Can not confirm this anyway, my trusty A1 XE is now sold.

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@nzv58l

Well that one was hard to guess... anyway I don't have the floppy connected anymore. Great to hear you got it working though.

@hotrod

When you removed the floppy, did you change the Uboot settings so that it no longer looked for it?

I've seen my A1 hang sometimes when Uboot and it's settings thinks something is plugged in that really isn't. And in some cases, like you saw, it may not hang until the OS4 driver tries to load for that device.

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@DWolfman

I can't recall that I did anything special but I can't check right now. I haven't had any issues from not having the floppy connected, I haven't even changed the kickstart-file since AOS 4.1 FE, it's a very clean install.

I didn't see anything, I haven't had any issues from not having the floppy connected to the motherboard. I don't understand why it should be an issue either, it's just one of many mediums that you can choose to use.

I haven't had the floppy connected for a very long time... like AOS 4.0 or early 4.1.

@hotrod
Did another little test. I was curious why I didn´t have company with my issues...

Here was what I did:
1.)Unplugged the floppy drive.
2.)Removed the power cord from the A1.
3.)Removed the clock battery from the board.
4.)Shorted out the battery terminals with a resistor to dissapate any electrons left over in the circuit.

5.)Booted from the OS4.1fe CD.
6.)ReInitialized, and recreated partitions on the hard drive, (One sfs00 bootable and the other a SWAP partition)
7.)Booted again from the OS4.1fe CD.
8.)Formatted the DH0 partition.
9.)Installed the the sv2 onto the hd.
10.)Installed OS 4.1 FE onto the hd.
11.)Removed the CD.
12.)Rebooted from DH0
.....Success

.........If you would like to recreate the problem I had? Just follow the same proceedure with the floppy attached instead of disconnected. I think you will find that you get the same problem I had. Now for more excitement boot from the Install CD and remove the SWAP partition from your hard drive and then boot from the HD. My guess is that it will work one time and then when you reboot again the problem will happen again just as I have described.

@DWolfman

Did not have to change uboot settings. Just commenting it out of kicklayout was enough. I dont think there are any settings in uboot for the floppy. Right now I am wondering if it is the a1floppy.device.kmod that is dying on its own or if it is the system trying to use the floppy as a source to find the SWAP partition even though nothing is in the drive.

Good thing about this ordeal is I think I am set up pretty good for debugging purposes.

Also, I had tried just pulling the floppy off the board and just rebooting, but without the battery reset, it still thought the floppy was there.

@nzv58l

In your steps I didnt see you put the battery back in.

The floppy driver was removed in an earlier update as the Micro doesn't have a floppy controler and the driver can crash, or so I was told. So I don't know what it is doing back. I moved mine to my DEVS: and it worked fine after updates thet kept killing off the floppy.

That said, I installed FE with my floppy drive connected, and it booted fine. I didn't touch my working SWAP partition.

What size is your SWAP and how much memory do you have? For some reason my SWAP is 8GB! I don't know what happened there. Could be useful for a trim down, I could use the extra space. I have 2GB RAM.

I did encounter a screen mode problem. I installed FE at my club and it was fine. At home it loaded up fine and then went into a black screen. Although I had set screenmode I found it would not open any mode, default or otherwise, because my home monitor doesn't support DDC over VGA. I found it was hard to fix as even after setting a basic 640x480 mode is still refused to display. Sometimes It showed a screen and then after it wouldn't. Looked a touch too random. Eventually I somehow got a mode to stick but it was too much work! OS4.1 non-FE worked out of the box. Though IIRC that didn't save my mode setting on install.

I recently discovered a USB issue. I took my A1 to a friends place and when I reassembled it back home it wouldn't boot. Would get stuck on splash dim. I tried Linux and it also broke on boot but was listing USB before it did. I check around the back and on my USB2 card I move a cable. Turned out an inside port is wired to an outside port which was crashing the USB driver. Even though it was supposed to be a five port card. So it looks like my front USB port and card reader were connected together and it didn't like it.

Last edited by Hypex on 11-Jul-2015 at 05:15 PM.