A3000T up and running...

[T3000]

Just after installing the battery, reassembling the system and for what ever reason burning a trace upon fire up, two attempts at soldering a line with the mobo in and out a half dozen times and much frustration, sweat and solder, I belive the A3000T is up and running.

Burnt a trace (no where near the battery) which fouled up the zorro slot power feed, scrambled the 15khz display on a right mouse click, and totally lost the 31khz video. Don't know why except that I rushed the reassemble.

Fixed the trace and slowly reassembled the mobo one component at a time. All was going well until I plugged the fan power wires up. "zit", smoke and toast. Another trace fried. :-o Fixed the trace feeding the fan power, but have yet to wire in the fans cooling the DPS boards. Once again slowly reassembled the components one by one refiring the machine each step of the way until low and behold, the A3000Tower functions with all its cards installed.

So far anyway... :-D

[x56h34]

Glad to hear that you got it fixed. It would be a shame for such a beauty to collect dust.

[TjLaZer]

I just performed the Lithium hack to my 3000T and she is up and running as well! Only problem so far is the flakey floppy drives and CD-ROM problem. I have a old Smart and Frinedly CDR drive SCSI and it does not seem to work very well. Read errors and hangs a lot. Termination seems fine, I will try another drive.

[x56h34]

@TjLaZer:

Don't forget to tweak the SCSI parameters with SetBatt (Aminet) in order to get the best performance out of your A3000(T) SCSI chain.

Sometimes drives won't even work without playing around with NVRam SCSI settings.

[Noster]

Hi,

> Only problem so far is the flakey floppy drives and CD-ROM problem.
> I have a old Smart and Frinedly CDR drive SCSI and it does not seem to work very well.
> Read errors and hangs a lot. Termination seems fine, I will try another drive.

I just found the cause, why one of my A3000T has been died.
During my search, I found the cause for my flakey floppy drives and Paula-DMA failures:

Super DMAC is bad. Using another one it works now.

Noster

[TjLaZer]

@Noster

What mine is doing is the DF0: seems to act like disk is removed and inserted. Drive looses connection and asks to insert disk in the middle of a read! Sometimes when I insert disk the computer does not recognize it and I have to eject and insert it again. This drive is a HD drive and reads/write to HD disks as well, but with above problems still applying.

The other drive is also a HD (same model) and seems to work perfectly BUT does not act like a HD drive!!! (ie will not read/write to a HD disk)

Too bad the 3000T case does not have 3.5" oppenings in them, or I would insert another drive, like the Chinon FZ-357 that I adapted to work with Amigas.

On the CD-ROM it seems to be working ok but when copying files it sometimes hangs (especially in WB, but not as much in Dir Opus 4) I will try this drive on my 4000 to see if it is indeed the drive.

[Noster]

Hi,

@TjLaZer

> What mine is doing is the DF0: seems to act like disk is removed and inserted.
> Drive looses connection and asks to insert disk in the middle of a read!
> Sometimes when I insert disk the computer does not recognize it and I have to eject and insert it again.
> This drive is a HD drive and reads/write to HD disks as well, but with above problems still applying.

This is exact the problem I've had. It was nearly impossible to format a disk, at any time during formating the process stops and the requester pops up and noticed me that I have to reinsert the disk :-(
Now with another Super DMAC this problem is gone :-)

Another problem was that the Paula DMA mode of AHI didn't work (I haven't tested if this mode is working now, I will look...).

> The other drive is also a HD (same model) and seems to work perfectly BUT does not act like a HD drive!!! (ie will not read/write to a HD disk)

Wasn't there a general problem with two HD-floppies in an Amiga ? I have a DD-drive as second drive and I can remember that it was very tricky to get this to work:

At first I have had to use the HD-drive as DF1: and the DD as DF0: otherwise it wasn't recognized by the system.
Second I have to change the drive-select jumper of the HD-drive.
Third I have to set the jumper on the mainboard to "no DF1" !!

This was the only way, I could get my disk-drives to work, and this combination also works on my other A3000T. But I have no experiences with two HD-drives in one Amiga, they are so expensive so I only spend one HD-drive and one DD-drive to both A3000T.

> On the CD-ROM it seems to be working ok but when copying files it sometimes hangs.

With my A3640 accelerator I've had a problem with a CD-Rom mounted in the vertical bay next to the accelerator card:
The 68040 CPU gets to hot and the CD-Rom also gets hot and as a result of this it failes to read after half an hour of system run.

A second problem might be the SCSI-chip. Until I've got the revision -08 SCSI-chip for my A3000T, I've had the problem, that the SCSI-bus hangs sometimes, when I copy files from one drive to another or to the streamer. If I copy the files to the RAM-disk or to the same drive, no problem occured.
The problem disappeared with my CyberstormPPC because I exchanged all harddisks against UW-SCSI drives and attached them to the UW-SCSI controller of the Cyberstorm.
Now only the CD, the Syquest removable harddisk, the streamer and the external devices (CD-R and scanner) are still attached to the on-board SCSI-controller and I don't have to copy files from one device on the on-board SCSI-bus to another one on the same cable (I've never copied CD's on-the-fly).

Anyway, this problem might be a result of the SCSI-chip on the Amiga mainboard. I have replaced the "WD-04" against the -08 revision (after I got my accelerator) because I want to be able to make on-the-fly CD-copies and the hanging-bus might be a problem of the PROTO chip and should be resolved with the new revision (MakeCD user's guide Appendix A, SCSI-problems A.4.1).

Noster