Falcon bizarre floppy problem

[smoore100]

If you can't resolve the issues you're more than welcome to bring the CF card to my house and I can slot it in to my Falcon and help get it configured.

I'm not too far down the A38 from Derby,

Many thanks,

Simon

[jms2]

Nice one - thanks! I'll see what other experiments I can do first though.

I have just removed the RF shielding to have a look at the HD installation. My memory has failed again here - it's not a CF card, it's an SD card adaptor which uses an FC1307 chip. It's certainly the case that none of the .PRG utilities load from the hard disc, even though they originally did (from floppy). And also, if I try opening text files from the hard disc, their content is garbled even though the filenames are all OK.

I think I have to conclude that the combination of SD interface, SD card, and drivers doesn't quite work properly. This may or may not be related to the floppy issues, but it probably makes sense to try to fix this in isolation first. The fact that I was able to apparently get it all working using the floppy originally suggests to me that the floppy might actually be alright on its own.

[rubber_jonnie]

Nice one - thanks! I'll see what other experiments I can do first though.

I have just removed the RF shielding to have a look at the HD installation. My memory has failed again here - it's not a CF card, it's an SD card adaptor which uses an FC1307 chip. It's certainly the case that none of the .PRG utilities load from the hard disc, even though they originally did (from floppy). And also, if I try opening text files from the hard disc, their content is garbled even though the filenames are all OK.

I think I have to conclude that the combination of SD interface, SD card, and drivers doesn't quite work properly. This may or may not be related to the floppy issues, but it probably makes sense to try to fix this in isolation first. The fact that I was able to apparently get it all working using the floppy originally suggests to me that the floppy might actually be alright on its own.

So with the SD card reader removed entirely and just the FDD or Gotek connected, how do things go?

[jms2]

Hard to say, because I don’t have a hard disc to copy things onto, and the only disc images I have to hand are ST games which it seems the Falcon can’t run anyway!

I’ll try making some more useful floppy images later on for testing purposes. At least I could try copying from A to B.

[smoore100]

Could you perhaps use Hatari to set up the SD card with HDDriver on a PC and then try it on the Falcon?

[jms2]

Thanks everyone for the interest and the helpful suggestions. :D

Could you perhaps use Hatari to set up the SD card with HDDriver on a PC and then try it on the Falcon?

Good suggestion, but as you'll see below I think we might have bigger problems!

Incidentally, I looked closely at the HDDriver website and whilst I can see that it looks excellent, it's not cheap. This is why I went with the free option, but obviously if HDDriver is essential I guess we'll buy it. However...

So with the SD card reader removed entirely and just the FDD or Gotek connected, how do things go?

Not well, I think. :( I decided to re-connect the floppy and copy the NetUSBee drivers from one disk to another. I found two issues, one of which might be normal but I thought I'd better ask:

1) I'm copying a folder with some sub-folders and 48 small files in it. The Falcon seemed to be asking me to swap disks for every single file. Surely that's not normal is it?

2) For the first 2 or 3 files things seemed to be working, although the prospect of swapping the disks 48 times was already getting me down. But then I started getting the "disk contents may be damaged" messages again. At this point I decided to stop.

The next test is to set up a blank floppy image on the Gotek and try moving some files between Gotek images, as these are 100% guaranteed not to have physical faults. But I'm not feeling optimistic. It seems to me that there is some kind of machine-wide problem which is affecting certain aspects of file reads (not writes, though, apparently). The machine passes its RAM test OK so I'm wondering about either the mainboard caps or the clock mod. Do either of those possibilities sound vaguely plausible?

[mikro]

Sure, floppy problems are also typical w/O clock patch, although not as famous as SCSI and SDMA issues.

[jms2]

I have been reading about clock-related issues and I was coming to the same conclusion.

[Badwolf]

I've never seen this issue on a Falcon, but I have on STs when fiddling with the ACSI port. which is a DMA device.

Falcon doesn't have one of those, but it does have SCSI instead. I assume you'd have mentioned it if you had anything on the SCSI bus -- but I don't think you've specifically said you're using IDE, so I'll just check.

Anyway the IDE interface is PIO-based rather than DMA, so it rarely has complicated hardware issues. Problems with IDE tend to be the adapters attached.

The floppy interface is a DMA device however, so it can potentially be affected by the infamous SDMA problems the clock patch tries to solve.

The fitted clock patch is not the greatest the world has ever seen, so it's entirely possible it's that.

So the two main suspects are floppy reading problems because of dodgy SDMA clock or dodgy IDE adapter (ok, a third may be the ICD hard disc driver, but you could always try another free one: Atari's own AHDI. It's not free as in speech, but is free as in beer. It was shipped on the Falcon Language Disc and may be found easily enough online -- you could also try to get EmuTOS' program version running as that completely removes the need for a disc driver. There's only one file to copy, but it's a big one).

If you can successfully copy complicated directory structures from the IDE to itself, it's probably not the adapter, although I admit it's tricky to set this test up without some other storage device to source files from originally.

You really need to rule that out before you can prove it's the floppy, though.

I would suggest using UIP-Tool which will provide a simple web interface for file transfer with your NetUSB. It is only a single small file so perhaps stands a better chance of copying or running than most. Try the 50kb v310 executable here: https://bitbucket.org/sqward/uip-tools/downloads/

EmuTOS PRG is here (extract first and transfer just the one file if you can get UIP working):- https://sourceforge.net/projects/emutos ... p/download

I think this should give you enough tools to locate the fault provided you can get one file to run somewhere.

Good luck.

BW

[jms2]

That's right, there's nothing on the SCSI bus, I'm just using IDE. Thanks for the analysis, it's useful to know that the problems affecting the two filesystems are probably separate. This does make sense in terms of the symptoms - some files (not all) seem to be corrupt on the IDE drive, but moving them about appears OK, whereas on the floppy there doesn't seem to be any file corruption but bits drop off the directory tree if it gets deeper than one level of folders... I think.

I think I could possible copy files one at a time to the IDE drive, and small files on there don't seem to get corrupted (otherwise, how could the ICD driver work at all?). So getting NetUSBee going in a hacky sort of way is still a possibility.

You've given me some excellent pointers there, so I'll continue experimenting to try to narrow down the symptoms as much as possible.

Can you say whether the "one tiny file at a time" copying behaviour I noted is normal? Not sure if that's a symptom or not.

Incidentally, I have not done anything with the NVRAM on this machine. Although I know what it's typically used for on other machines, what does it do on the Falcon? I haven't seen any actual symptoms of it not working. Could it still actually be working, or is it battery-based?