Amiga corruption annoyance
Allen Petlock
Amiga 4000, using Workbench 3.0, and all the hard drives have the Fast
File System on them. It appears, that every once and awhile (well, more
often than not), my files get corrupted. LHA files, ANIM files, graphic
files of all sizes and shapes. The is especially evident with toaster
framestores. If I copy one from RAM to the hard drive, or copy it at all,
really, it gets corrupted and programs like ADPro can't read it in fully.
I've heard about not resetting the computer while a file is open,
apparantly the Amiga keeps files open until you tell it not to. And I've
grown accustomed to clicking on the close box to shut off a shell. A
friend of mine always types 'endcli' to get out of a shell. Does that
make a difference? Do I have to quit the workbench before turning off
the computer?
Thanks for any assistance!
-Allen
--
The time is gone the post is over, thought I'd something more to say...
John P Sheehy
Does this always happen with the same files? If you copy those files to
ram: first and load them from there, are they O.K.? If the answer to
both questions is yes, you may have the same problem that I did.
Your DMA transfers are not aligning themselves properly. What you need
to do is change the MASK value of all your partitions so that the last
value is 'C'. For instance, if the masks are 07fffffe, change them to
07fffffc. The changes can be made with HDToolbox, and do not take effect
until you reboot. If this doesn't help, you may need to lower the max-
transfer values. Try 1fe00, and if that doesn't help try ffff. It is
important that you not change any other parameters than the masks and
maxtransfers. Those values generally can't do any harm, but if you
change other parameters, you may delete the contents of the drives.
Let me know if this helps.
>-Allen
>
>--
>The time is gone the post is over, thought I'd something more to say...
John <j...@cup.portal.com>
Peter Kittel Germany
>
> I've been having this problem since I got the computer. I have an
>Amiga 4000, using Workbench 3.0, and all the hard drives have the Fast
>File System on them. It appears, that every once and awhile (well, more
>often than not), my files get corrupted. LHA files, ANIM files, graphic
>files of all sizes and shapes.
Hmm, if you had said "only big files", I would immediately suspect you
have a harddrive with that MaxTransfer error. The cure would be to use
HDToolBox and set the MaxTransfer value to 64 KB, which is a setting
of 0xffff. Try this anyway, you don't need to reformat the drive.
>The is especially evident with toaster
>framestores. If I copy one from RAM to the hard drive, or copy it at all,
>really, it gets corrupted and programs like ADPro can't read it in fully.
Hmm, other guess is you have some hardware problem in the RAM area,
bad RAM chips, some interference from some expansion card or on the
power lines, or, or, or...
> I've heard about not resetting the computer while a file is open,
>apparantly the Amiga keeps files open until you tell it not to.
But every normal application does close its files. This should hardly
ever be able to cause problems.
>And I've
>grown accustomed to clicking on the close box to shut off a shell. A
>friend of mine always types 'endcli' to get out of a shell. Does that
>make a difference? Do I have to quit the workbench before turning off
>the computer?
Nah, all this is normally not necessary. I recommend to investigate
the hardware and the drive's firmware, see above.
--
Best regards, Dr. Peter Kittel // E-Mail to \\ Only my personal opinions...
Commodore Frankfurt, Germany \X/ pet...@cbmger.de.so.commodore.com
Allen Petlock
: Does this always happen with the same files? If you copy those files to
: ram: first and load them from there, are they O.K.? If the answer to
: both questions is yes, you may have the same problem that I did.
: Your DMA transfers are not aligning themselves properly. What you need
: to do is change the MASK value of all your partitions so that the last
: value is 'C'. For instance, if the masks are 07fffffe, change them to
: 07fffffc. The changes can be made with HDToolbox, and do not take effect
: until you reboot. If this doesn't help, you may need to lower the max-
: transfer values. Try 1fe00, and if that doesn't help try ffff. It is
: important that you not change any other parameters than the masks and
: maxtransfers. Those values generally can't do any harm, but if you
: change other parameters, you may delete the contents of the drives.
: Let me know if this helps.
Yeah, someone else also e-mailed me about the MaxTransfer value.
Since IDE drives only transfer in 64k blocks, I lowered it by entering ffff.
Wasn't aware of the masking, but I haven't had any problems after changing
the setting. I'll have to see. Thanks much for the help!
Peter Kittel Germany
>
> Yeah, someone else also e-mailed me about the MaxTransfer value.
>Since IDE drives only transfer in 64k blocks, I lowered it by entering ffff.
Please add in your last sentence: Since *some* IDE drives (*made by dumb
only PC knowing dweebs*) only...
John P Sheehy
Well, if that works for you, you shouldn't have to change the mask. I had
the problem on an A3000 with SCSI drives (all three of them, AAMOF) when
I added an 040 and a new DMAC chip. Certain files would always corrupt
themselves _EXACTLY_ the same way, anytime a particular program loaded
them using DMA into the memory on the 040 card. After months of avoiding
using that ram, I read a post on BIX that made me think about changing the
mask value to 7FFFFFFC, which I understood would cause longword-aligned
transfers. You see, I found that the corruption was always the repetition
or ommission of shortword (two byte) pairs. In my case, changing the
'maxtransfer' didn't solve the problem, it just changed the way the problem
would manifest itself (as in which pairs of bytes would be duplicated or
ommitted).
I think you should leave your mask the way it is if it works, since it is
remotely possible that a 'C' in the mask may cause a slowdown on some
transfers (although I've yet to see such a slowdown).
>-Allen
>
>--
>The time is gone the post is over, thought I'd something more to say...
... the lunatic is on the net ...
John <j...@cup.portal.com>