Hyperion Entertainment Message Boards

Before I forget, some crucial elements of my SAM460ex are:

Hard drive: sii3114 (Hitachi JP6940HZIA JP40
DVD drive: ATAPI iHAS324 B LA15
Graphics card: Radeon RV730

Lately booting the SAM has been a bit scary. Can anyone diagnose these symptoms?

The other morning it seemed to start fine, but got to a very faded OS4.1 splash screen and stopped. Reset button got me to "Loading Kickstart" with a full progress bar, but stopped there. Another tap on the reset button got me a normal workbench.

A couple days later, it did it again, getting to
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Booting Amiga OS4 Update 6
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Kicksstart/fpga.resoursce.kmod

and stopping forever there.

This morning (2013-08-20), something new; as it seemed to be booting normally, suddenly:
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Press a key to open U-Boot prompt!
Unknown return code from secondary bootloader.
Press any key to continue
] boota

It hung again at Kicksstart/fpga.resoursce.kmod, but it took only one push of the reset button to get a full boot to a working Workbench.

This afternoon I tried over and over again, failing to boot 10 times before I gave up. The boot might stop somewhere at random in Kickstart, so I had:

Kickstart/graphics.library.kmod, then Kickstart/FastFileSystem, then this:

Bad checksum while reading second level bootloader
Bad checksum while reading second level bootloader
FLB: no SLB found [...]

Back to stopping at Kickstart/kernel, Kickstart/rtg.library, Kickstart/RadeonHD.chip, Kickstart/rtg.library.

Then, to keep things interesting, this:

Error (no IRQ) dev 0
blk -352575369: status 0x51
Loadsector: error when reading from block 3942391927

And then more failures at Kickstart/console.device.kmod, .../intuition.library.kmod, .../petunia.library.kmod.

I turned it off for an hour and reseated the sii3114 and the harddrive connections, and then it booted. I would have more hope that the reseating will have fixed it, except when Workbench came up, Playsound was a bit odd, and two dockies were out of place.

If it were an A1-XE, I'd suggest that you change the battery.

In fact, I'd still suggest that. For less than $5, it's a cheap test. Unless you have a meter and can verify that the voltage on top of the battery is > 3.0 V to chassis, that is.

One common problem with Sam-based systems is that the power supply is unable to provide such a low current and keep the voltage stable. One quick way to find out if to add extra load to your PSU by plugging in an extra hard drive (for example). If things suddenly become stable again then you know it is the PSU.

Also, if you think this is a hardware issue, you might want to try contacting ACube directly for help.

Once you get past uboot it could be a loose or bent SATA or power cable to the harddrive .
Also check the system time and date in Uboot and the battery.

Checking for loose SATA cable, +1.

BTW, I use cables with clips on all my SATA drives, it has helped reduce these incidents a lot. Although IIRC, the motherboard SATA socket on the 460 doesn't secure such a clip? (Which isn't a problem in your case, of course, since you use an SiI3114.)

Otherwise, also try reseating the RAM, if you haven't already.

Best regards,

Niels

I confess I felt a bit guilty and foolish posting my plaint when it seemed that pulling and reseating the ide card and cables might have already cured the problem, but with this batch of kind and thoughtful responses, I'm glad I did.

This had been my third try. I first asked at the Yahoo! OS4 group if it was likely to be a battery problem. A respondentr said probably not; why not ask ACube? So I asked ACube, but they wanted info on drives and cards, which I had forgotten to provide. I sent the information, but never heard from them again.

The machine seems to boot consistently now, although not quite properly --

LoadWB

Run >NIL: *>NIL: SoundPlayer QUIET

makes a lot of extra noise as Workbench slowly appears, with a much delayed dock. Maybe I should do the sound card the same way as the ide card.

In fact, I have been changing external cables frequently lately, switching back and forth from the SAM to the X1000, and I wonder if that loosened things up inside. I probably should get a KVM switch, but if I can get AmiCNV4 to work, I might not need it.

kilaueabart wrote:The machine seems to boot consistently now, although not quite properly --

LoadWB

Run >NIL: *>NIL: SoundPlayer QUIET

makes a lot of extra noise as Workbench slowly appears, with a much delayed dock.

Check whether you possibly also run the SoundPlayer from your WBStartup configuration; if it runs twice more or less simultaneously, it does sound weird and cause slowdowns, so that is a possible cause.

Best regards,

Niels