More keyboard details: CFE requires the keyboard to be connected to a specific USB input. Some "normal" USB keyboards, like my Rosewill cherry boards, will stall CFE and prevent a boot sequence, if connected to the correct USB socket. By connecting to a different USB input, my keyboards work fine after booting, and I either leave the CFE keyboard input empty, or I put a different keyboard there just for CFE boot select usage.
It's not much more than a nuisance, except for the few times I plugged in to the wrong spot and the machine refused to boot at all. (brief moment of terror before I realized what was wrong)
Last one remain : how to clear the whole settings of CFE, so they will be back to the initial/default ones ? Or this is not possible ?
This CFE settings saves in some vram probabaly and there should be a way to clear this up ?
What i want, it just to made it "user changes free", and be it "fresh". Of course i can manually dig in and step by step remove everything, but that will be kind of pain :)
If CFE versioning is the same in all the CFE updates, then what about checking on the data of build inside of CFE ? This one for sure should differs.
You're right, there is another way from inside CFE. You can examine a hex dump of the firmware using the "D" dump command. But I forget the details. If you dump 0x80000000 you should see it but I forget where the ROM is. I don't know where to find the info other than it should be at the standard PPC boot ROM location wherever that was.
Quote:
Have few more questions:
1. AFAIK OS4 will only output to serial 0.
2. Not that I know of. The only way is the physical way. Pulling the battery. Or jumpering CMOS clear as detailed in section 8.2.3. of TRM: 8.2.3 CMOS Clear To clear the CMOS RAM, fit a jumper link to P11 pins 2-3 momentarily before returning it to pins 1-2 for normal operation
3. I think it is. CFE can be buggy. I've found CFE will crash and reboot, when caused by either CFE, a faulty binary, bad SATA connection and bad RAM. It will either stall on a black screen or go into a reboot loop trying to boot. But I would have expected a reset command to actually work.
You're right, there is another way from inside CFE. You can examine a hex dump of the firmware using the "D" dump command. But I forget the details. If you dump 0x80000000 you should see it but I forget where the ROM is. I don't know where to find the info other than it should be at the standard PPC boot ROM location wherever that was.
As i have all version of CFE binary on my other computers, for me it just matter of read the binary in any editor. And i have all the answer about anyway, latest version is : "Fri Jun 8 16:04:49 CEST 2012"
As for settings : yeah, probabaly pulling out the battery will be the best choose, as i remember reading somewhere that this "jumpering CMOS clear" can be used as last one as can cause problems.
Didn't see this mentioned but while on the CFE subject.
Strange CFE errors: Sometimes you may see strange or non-sensible errors pop up in CFE. A common one is CFE dropping out when booting and saying it has "Insufficient memory" when failing to load amigaboot.of.
This can be caused by a glitch in SATA cables. It was a common error in the early days. The rest of us are used to these quirks by now.
As i have all version of CFE binary on my other computers, for me it just matter of read the binary in any editor. And i have all the answer about anyway, latest version is : "Fri Jun 8 16:04:49 CEST 2012"
Yes I saw that. That would be the easy way if you have a CFE binary. Otherwise if you are checking CFE from a live X1000 you can dump the firmware to find the build.
Ranger can also show firmware information. Not sure but it may also be able to find the build date. It can list NVRAM settings.
Quote:
As for settings : yeah, probabaly pulling out the battery will be the best choose, as i remember reading somewhere that this "jumpering CMOS clear" can be used as last one as can cause problems.
I'm usually afraid of loosing settings when changing battery. Only done it once on my X1000 IIRC. I've not tried the jumper as my settings have not corrupted.
It's slight manual setup but there is one way you could do it. After you "clean the slate" you could save settings and write a batch script to restore it. Using a serial debug grab the NVRAM settings. Now convert all the settings into a batch file that can reset them with setenv commands. Best to set them all of them locally then on the last line issue command to save to NVRAM.
The only caveat is it won't remove newer variables set up. But the method can be used to reset standard ones or even save what you have. Yes pulling battery easiest to do!
As is becoming common NVRAM can only be read from OS4 and not written. Don't know why. Makes the XE look like a luxury given it can write from OS4. So not an OS4 app could be written to reset NVRAM.
I suppose if it was known what's needed to write to NVRAM from OS level this restriction could be removed.
@All I got it that X1000 can't autoboot from USB, but have anyone any idea how i can avoid connecting cd-drive and burn an x1000 bootable iso on it, and instead install OS4 from USB ?
I mean, maybe we can put amigaboot.of on USB together with unpacked bootable ISO, or something of that sort ?
Found in X1000 users-settings, that for booting from Cd-rom were used that:
Quote:
MENU_1_COMMAND setenv amigaboot_quit Y ; boot -fs=iso atapi0.0:amigaboot.of
Through, everyone says that it can't autoboot installation iso from usb and CD-Rom is only the way with ?
Maybe something like boot amigaboot.of from one (fat16 formatted) usb stick, and then load up an installation from second usb stick with unpacked image on it ?
Also can anybody point me out: is X1000's CFE support "fat32" , or this "fatfs" only mean fat16 ? Just tried with FAT32 and 8GB stick - didn't work, but with FAt16 and 4gb stick do work.
Also i found in docs, there is "amigafs" , "iso", but when i do type help for CFE commands, all of them mention only "fatfs","rawfs" and "ext2". Nothing about amigafs and/or iso one. Are they still supported, and just CFE's help commands not updated with ?
Edited by kas1e on 2022/10/17 22:43:42 Edited by kas1e on 2022/10/17 22:58:17
Are you in contact with user @Epsilon? His amigax1000 blog used to be a great resource for everything X1000. Perhaps his experience might be helpful? https://www.epsilonsworld.com/
It should be able to autoboot USB if you modify the boot commands. Just like on the XE. But that is a different beast.
As standard it's set up to boot from either CD or HDD with no user intervention.
You could add boot commands to the main boot line. That tries to boot USB, then HDD. And just fallback or in this case if the USB boot falls it will just execute the next command.
But try this. Grab a spare USB stick you can wipe, then using RawWrite or any USB image writer, write the OS4 CD image directly to the disk. Now reboot and enter this:
boot -fs=iso usbdisk0:amigaboot.of
You will of course need updated drivers. So a CD image would need to be rebuilt for that to work. In that case, another way, use an Amiga format to simply copy files too. So format a USB stick as FFS from the USB commodity (fastest) or from MTB (slowest). Then copy the Workbench files and updated drivers to it. Reboot and try this:
boot -fs=amigafs usbdisk0:amigaboot.of
If it doesn't like that combination of mixed media and filesystems you shouldn't need two USB sticks to do it. Just partition a stick with boot volume and main volume. So FFS for boot with bootloader and SFS for main with Workbench.
CFE does support FAT32 but it has it's quirks. As stated before it can be picky and files go missing or it gives errors. It's also old so it may not support FAT32 on a 64-bit size disk since an 8GB stick is 64 bit range.
As to CFE not having help for amigafs. It probably wasn't updated internally. But they are supported as without it Amiga OS4 wouldn't boot!
So as can be seen it load amigaboot.of, but then says "No bootable devices found", and reboot.
ps. One more issue with CFE : if you poweron machine with already inserted USB in, then CFE didn't see it. You need to plug off and plug on usb stick to make it be visibly for CFE.
Quote:
You will of course need updated drivers. So a CD image would need to be rebuilt for that to work.
Why i need updated drivers for OS4 installation CD ? I have no needs for, it alrady come with necessary minimum (include radeonHD lite), so i should be able to install OS without updating anything, just like on x5k, sam460 and peg2. I just use latest cd-image for x1000 and later i can update anything.
The problem now that i have "no bootable devices found" when i rawwrite and x1000 iso on usb stick and do "boot -fs=iso usbdisk0:amigaboot.of".
Maybe i can use 2 sticks, like one to boot amigaboot.of from it, and another with installation data ?
Edited by kas1e on 2022/10/18 8:52:06 Edited by kas1e on 2022/10/18 8:56:19 Edited by kas1e on 2022/10/18 8:56:46
So as can be seen it load amigaboot.of, but then says "No bootable devices found", and reboot.
It crashed! That version looks really old. V1.0. You should have at least amigaboot 53.21 (13/06/2016).
Lately this is taken by AEON but either one should be better. I'll find a USB stick I can scrap. And do some testing later on.
Quote:
if you poweron machine with already inserted USB in, then CFE didn't see it. You need to plug off and plug on usb stick to make it be visibly for CFE.
Yeah that's normal. I didn't see it much because I left a USB stick in my Apple keyboard that was detected when I wanted to boot Linux from it. So a work around could be to use a hub or it could really be that CFE only scans the USB keyboard port which is why it worked for me. So you may need a hub connected to keyboard port so it detects it. Yes another annoying quirk.
Quote:
Why i need updated drivers for OS4 installation CD ?
Because if you boot a standard CD, like FE, you will get a black screen if you have something like a HD6000 or newer.
I don't recall what model breaks, I had a HD5450 that worked, but at some model they won't work. Because the RadeonHD lite driver is depreciated and isn't updated anymore. Unless you have an old card, that also lacks 3d support in the process, it won't boot.
I fail to find a specific list of supported cards in the lite driver. All I know is my FE CD doesn't with my R7 250.
Quote:
Maybe i can use 2 sticks, like one to boot amigaboot.of from it, and another with installation data ?
You could, but only if your HDD breaks. You could also just let it load amigaboot.of off HDD and then find USB. Of course if no amigaboot scans for USB then the whole idea is pointless and it really then cannot boot off USB no matter what you do.
The easiest way to test would be to copy a boot volume to a USB drive formatted as FFS2. Yes it will be slower over FFS2, unless you enable caching with the now old FFS cache commands. But CFE can load a binary off FFS2. Anything else is not Amiga format so complicates it.
You must be annoyed by now at searching for X1000 USB boot and only getting result X5000 USB boot or how easy it is to create a USB booter.
It crashed! That version looks really old. V1.0. You should have at least amigaboot 53.21 (13/06/2016).
I do use one which is in the latest x1000 iso : amigaboot 53.4 (19.11.2010).
Did i understand right that you saying that more fresh amigaboot are able to make x1000 to boot from usb with this "-fs=iso atapi0.1:amigaboot.of" ?
Checked release notes for amigaboot.of, and find that:
Quote:
amigaboot 53.11 (18.9.2015) <sbauer>
- Added support for iso9660 filesystem on 512 bytes block devices. This, for instance, allows to boot from iso images that have been raw-copied to a USB stick. <sbauer>
Maybe that was it ?
Quote:
Because if you boot a standard CD, like FE, you will get a black screen if you have something like a HD6000 or newer.
I use radeonHD 250 or something, and while do tests with CD booting, it at least go the the level showing me all the windowses and co.
Quote:
You must be annoyed by now at searching for X1000 USB boot and only getting result X5000 USB boot or how easy it is to create a USB boote
So far X5000 looks for real better than x1000. I of course do get x1000 for own reassons and testing, but for users for sure better to get x5000 , at least for those reassons:
1). Uboot not as crashy as CFE 2). X5000 have rs232 on the rare of board 3). USB boot possible by default 4). Everything better and faster than in x1000.
So if one think about x1000 or x5000 : for sure x5000. x1000 only if you have it for low cost, like i get it for 1000euro , but if money is no problems, then surely x5000 only.
Btw, while i fight with CD installation, i noticed some annoing problem which i have with Pegasos2 back in years : VERY SLOW loading of data from CD. I.e. to get to the "Welcome to the amigaos4.1 installation CD" window, i wait dunno, 5-7 minutes for sure. I remember that it was something about the port you connect to or the write speed you use when burn installation ISO or kind of .. But i do have HDD for now on Sata0, and cd-drive on Sata2, and so loading of installation cd take for real 5-7 minutes, maybe 10. That why i want to install from USB.
I will try newer amigaboot.of , maybe it will find that USB is bootable too.
Edited by kas1e on 2022/10/18 14:07:50 Edited by kas1e on 2022/10/18 14:09:10 Edited by kas1e on 2022/10/18 14:10:46 Edited by kas1e on 2022/10/18 14:13:14 Edited by kas1e on 2022/10/18 15:17:11 Edited by kas1e on 2022/10/18 16:07:54
I were under opinion that i made USB boot to work just by create my own X1000 CD, with newer Amigaboot.of, but that was falsely positive, because it just loads up from my HDD.. Damn..(i just have left kernel moduels and stuff when testing CD installing)
So seems amigaboot.of still can't find bootable USB stick, sadly. It brings exactly the same issue even with latest amigaboot.of, and crashes the same after.
Edited by kas1e on 2022/10/18 16:09:16 Edited by kas1e on 2022/10/18 17:34:45 Edited by kas1e on 2022/10/18 20:56:29 Edited by kas1e on 2022/10/18 20:57:56 Edited by kas1e on 2022/10/18 20:59:15
I do use one which is in the latest x1000 iso : amigaboot 53.4 (19.11.2010).
Ouch. Almost 12 years old. They left that on the X1000 FE CD?
Quote:
Did i understand right that you saying that more fresh amigaboot are able to make x1000 to boot from usb with this "-fs=iso atapi0.1:amigaboot.of" ?
Sorry no, I can't confirm that, it's just V1.0 is really old. So if it was going to work a newer one would be needed.
Quote:
Maybe that was it ?
Aha. Yes that looks better. So it has a hardware limitation of 512 bytes per block? Don't know if USB sticks have more. A CD uses 2048.
Can check from MTB from Install screen.
Quote:
I use radeonHD 250 or something, and while do tests with CD booting, it at least go the the level showing me all the windowses and co.
R5 250? It must be supported by lite driver then.
Quote:
So far X5000 looks for real better than x1000. I of course do get x1000 for own reassons and testing, but for users for sure better to get x5000 , at least for those reassons:
Yes, if the X5000 had AliVec, it would kill the X1000. Not that I use vectors much but they can help in some applications. The X1000 may still hold its own in some CPU operations.
The X5000 looks more user friendly. The X1000 still has boot menus that can be configured. But there is no menu editor to do it so there's some work involved.
The serial out was an option but I guess only beta testers optioned that on. I did. But it needs to be mounted on a back panel.
By accounts it also boots faster. You would have noticed how slow the X1000 is to boot. An XE would make it look silly. I don't know if the X5000 has much a delay bringing the video card up but on the X1000 it will be 10 to 15 seconds just to bring up the video card for the logo. After that it then wastes more time doing I don't know what. Finally it starts reading the HDD! By the time my X1000 starts loading OS4 my XE had booted to Workbench 20 seconds ago.
Quote:
But i do have HDD for now on Sata0, and cd-drive on Sata2, and so loading of installation cd take for real 5-7 minutes, maybe 10. That why i want to install from USB.
You do have the drives on the standard ports. That's too long. It shouldn't be that slow. How recent is your CD drive? A DVD drive shouldn't take that long. I have Bluray drives and it wouldn't take too long.
It will take its time loading Kickstart as it likely uses PIO 0 or something. But after that it should speed up. DMA should be activated when DOS kicks in.
Quote:
I were under opinion that i made USB boot to work just by create my own X1000 CD, with newer Amigaboot.of, but that was falsely positive, because it just loads up from my HDD.. Damn..(i just have left kernel moduels and stuff when testing CD installing)
Damn. I was getting excited. So I did a test last night. Man, USB on OS4 is still buggy! First I tried to format from the mass storage commodity. Doesn't work. Then I tried something else and it took down the system. Had to reboot. This reveals another X1000 flaw. You have to constantly keep a serial cable connected or you miss crash logs. For some reason they broke the debug bugger on the X1000. When you soft reboot you lose the buffer so there goes your crash report!
So I created a FFS2 volume from MTB to test and was copying my test volume to it. Thought I would give fs_plugin_cache a go. Still slow. Then the classic AddBuffers. Oops wrecked it. System freeze!
Wiped it all off and then set it up with FFS2 for boot and SFS for WB. Back to CFE and couldn't get it to work. CFE is too fiddly. It's good you can do a dir but you need to know filesystem as it doesn't know or check itself. Tiring.
I found also it didn't mount my stick. But did mount it in my keyboard. Seriously!
Come to think of it I may have forgot to write the bootloader on. I'll test again. And then try with a CD image.
Quote:
So seems amigaboot.of still can't find bootable USB stick, sadly. It brings exactly the same issue even with latest amigaboot.of, and crashes the same after.
Something is wrong there. I'm sure I read about that bug being fixed. ATM amigaboot.of is also on uncertain terms because since ExecSG changed ownership it's now in the hands of AEON. So the latest version available is 54.0 on my system. Apparently Trevor wrote it.
What is your CFE variable amigaboot_quiet set at? Should be set to N so you get a boot menu.
@All Did i understand right, that when install os4 on Nemo, you need manually create FFS partition where will be "amigaboot.of" placed, and only then System and Work ones can be SFS2 ?
Why i ask : because i for now start installing from CD, and when i just create 2 partitions System (SFS0), and work (SFS2), then amigaos4 installs as expected to SFS0, placed amigaboot.of to it, and then, i can't boot from harddisk because CFE seems can't boot from SFS0 partition ?
Making system partition be FFS one of course is no go absolutely, so it mean i should create some small "boot" partition which is FFS, place an amigaboot.of there, and then create usuall System and Work ones being SFS2 ?
Just want to understand if it problem of CFE or what ? Because on X5000 i surely didn't create any special partitions manually, i just have all of them be NGFS and all boots/works.
As far as i understand it, amigaboot file for x5000 placed on the microSD card, that why i didn't see it on my system partitions on x5000. But then, dunno what the filesystem is used on this microSD card which allow uboot to find it and boot from... Probabaly Fat16 or something ?
But on Nemo, when i format system as SFS0, and installation do place amigaboot.of on it, then CFE after didn't see this partition (even if i do "dir -fs=amigafs ide0.0:"), saying unknown filesystem.
So it looks like CFE can't handle anything amiga's but only FFS, mean i should somewhere create ffs partiion and put amigaboot.of file on it (or fat16 / iso one whatever). On x5000 we just lucky to have both uboot and amigaboot on the microSD card by default, so just problem just hide from users, which is surely better in compare creating all of this manually as on x1000.
I thinking about 2 ways then :
1). 1mb FFS partition called "boot" and there just amigaboot.of and that all.
2). put amigaboot.of to compact flash (this one probabaly can be formatted just as FAT16 as well as CFE surely can read that).
ps. reading installation.txt in the amigaboot archive, found that:
Quote:
The "Open Firmware" (OF) version consists of the single file "amigaboot.of". Normally this file is placed into the first partition on the first disk in the system (see Note 1). It need be the only file in the partition, so the partition need be only big enough to contain that single file. Currently the boot partition must be formatted as FFS. The variant and block size are unimportant, but if you use FFS\07 and a 512-byte block size, you won't go wrong.
So, that it. Boot partition should be as FFS one. Strange that installation procedure didn't ask me about.
@All Is it me, or x1000 installation CD just didn't ask about where to install bootloader (amigaboot.of) and you should manually do so ? For another openfirmware machine like pegasos2, installation CD surely ask to where install bootloader and you choose your "boot:" partition for, but whole system install coming to System (dh0). On X1000 i just didn't see this dialog, everything installes as it , and no question about to which put amigaboot.of , and i should boot to WB from CD, and copy amigaboot.of manually. Seems like bug in x1000 installation CD ?
Quick answer. Yes you need a boot volume for amigaboot.of. Thought I may have mentioned that in one of my big posts last page.
If you have a spare CF card you can format as FFS2 and stick it there but you will need to change CFE boot line. So it loads cf0:amigaboot.of instead.
Otherwise, backup then create a boot volume and Workbench again. Be great if you could resize/move a volume or even copy to RAM, insert volume, format then copy back.
As you found out OS4 is rather ignorant at times because it wasn't programmed to do proper checks for a boot loader. I brought this up about amigaboot.of being a file that needs a boot volume instead of an SLB you install in. I was told it's easier for them to copy a file than the SLB way. It doesn't matter how it's done, what matters is MTB sets it up.
Later there was some BOOT volume convention but it was too late. Now, MTB should have created this itself, as part of the install process. Why doesn't it create a boot volume as part of the HDD install process and copy amigaboot.of there? Problem solved!
No, MTB is not logical. What do we expect? It selects DOS3 for you when DOS7 is the only supported FFS for OS4. Many people got caught on that one. This was meant to be a quick reply.
News feed
OS4 Feedback forum
OS4Depot Feedback forum
Amigabounty forum
OpenAmiga forum
AmiCygnix forum
ABC shell forum
AmiKit forum
Cinnamon Writer forum
CodeBench forum
Digital Universe forum
Dopus 5 forum
E-UAE forum
Gnash forum
Ibrowse forum
JAmiga forum
Odyssey forum
OWB forum
Qt forum
SmartFileSystem forum
Timberwolf forum
TouchDevice forum
TuneNet forum
Unsatisfactory Software forum
Donate
