The Sam, and me.

Day 1

It has been a few years since I last booted an Amiga. Kit comes to me to die, or so it seems. I have but to touch the keyboard of a Sony portable for it to fail to boot with "No Operating System Found", or to BSOD when I plug in a USB device. So it was with great trepidation that I screwed the brand new Sam 440 into the case that had once housed an A1XE, plugged in the SATA hard drive I had laying around and wondered quite what I was going to do about getting the OS on there. I had a SATA DVD drive on order, along with a molex-sata converter but it wasn't due to arrive until this afternoon or, possibly, tomorrow.

With my Sony a mere smoking pile until I work out how to fix it, I decided as a background task I would get the Sam up and running with AmigaOS4.1. I found my SIL RAID card would fit, yanked off the warning sticker on the PCI slot (only 3.3volt devices on pain of getting your arse kicked) and shoved it in. Plugged in a CD-ROM drive as the DVD R/W that I used to have has long since joined the walking undead in my store cupboard - told you I was jinxed - and fired her up. Oh look, a pretty little logo at the top. Nothing found on IDE 0 but there are loads of ellipses going across for IDE 4. Progress bar goes across, does it boot, does it heck.

So I tried various combinations, putting the IDE cable in the first slot, copying some parameters for SIL cards that Sundown had posted somewhere. Increasing the timeouts. Nada.

Nil desperadum, I've got a USB DVD drive! I'll try that, I notice there is a USB boot option (usbboot amazingly) and I plug in the USB drive. Oh hang on, Uboot only recognises USB devices if they go in the topmost USB port on the backplane. We can deal with that, KVM can go into the USB hub along with the drive, and the hub can plug into the USB port.

Boot.

usb tree

Oh look there it is! Device 3. We are on schedule and rockin' now.

]usbboot 500000 3:0

Storage device not initialized. Use usb scan.
] usb scan
No storage devices, perhaps not; usb start'ed?
usb start
(Re) start USB
USB: OCI pci controller found...
Scanning bus for devlices
1 usb device(s) found
scanning bus for storage devices 0 storage devices found

Hmm. OK, let me do "usb tree" again... Oh, I can't, it isn't reading what I type! Arrgh! It has only gone and disconnected the kvm!

Right, I'll plug in the internal USB headers to the junction on the mobo.

Retried. KVM at the front, USB drive at the back. Same problem (except sometimes it came up with 1 storage device).

Googled. Nothing helpful found.

I'm jinxed.

Heh, look it supports tftpboot! Excellent. So I whacked in the OS4.1 install CD on an Ubuntu based laptop, copied the cd contents to the /srv/Amiga directory and then tried it. On the Sam I configured UBoot to look for the right tftp server, and to have its own IP address.

Boot.

tftpboot and hit return.

Why is it looking for 3204A8CO.img? I didn't see that on the CD?

No, it isn't there.

Google the parameters. So I looked, and found some other instructions to do with flashing uboot, but helpfully they showed tftpboot's arguments. But what to load? slb_v2? Why not.

Then I tried, and it just downloaded, and did a grand total of nothing. Boota? Same messages as before. Sigh. Oh, hold on. there is a setenv setting for autostart. Setenv autostart yes, THEN do the tftpboot.

Bad magic number.

Oh fantastic. I just love plug and play. So that isn't the right file, what about, oh look, system/kickstart/bootimage.

Bad magic number.

Great.

Final idea. Copy it all to a USB key (1Gb) and put that in instead of the drive in case the drive is incompatible. Boot. Oooh! What was THAT flashing down the screen? Looks like a crash and the Sam has reset. I tried it in different USB slots and the only thing that would vaguely work was putting it in the rear USB port without the KVM or the keyboard plugged in. Did it boot? No. Because I couldn't get the parameters to set up or check anything (no keyboard see - and for those watching in the Sam does not have built in IDE ports or PS/2 ports) I was stuffed. So I plugged it in all alone to the internal/front usb I had set up earlier. Nada.

I guess I am just going to have to boot it up off the SATA DVD/rw when it arrives. Jolly good. Sigh.

The thing is, if there IS information out there to help me do this or to say not to bother, I couldn't find it quickly or easily.

Day 1 time expended, still no OS4.1 booted.

@DaveP

Sounds like me, Amigas and CD/DVD drives, they always die or even worse turn up dead and you cant get a refund without getting the credit card company involved because the company in question is shit.

Still it all sounds a bit cock-eyed to me, you would expect after this long using uboot, the info would be out there somewhere.

Mark

@DaveP

Well, if ANYONE can get the durn thing running, you can. I look forward to the next instalment...

Hmmm, If this were me I would just byte the bullet and save my money for a pre built sam system. Much easier that way without any of the fuss.

@magic

Where's the fun in that? :P

Simon

@Magic :
I did bought both Sam440EP 667Mhz and Sam440Flex 800Mhz on a french amiga shop but I didn't bought the tower, hd, dvd burner from this shop.
I did build my both system myself and encounter NO PROBLEM on installing Amiga OS 4.1 ...
I just followed what was said to put HD in J20 and CD/DVD on J23 .... After this CD boot correctly, launch Amiga OS 4.1 and then I've formatted and installed Amiga OS 4.1 with no difficulty...

I think he encounter a compatiiblity issue...

The saga continues ...

Simon Archer (Rigo) helpfully took time out to get me to talk through the configuration as it should bloody work.

Well, I tried the card in another machine and the CD-ROM and it worked. After a bit of to-ing and fro-ing with some config variables I was persauded to treat the CD-ROM drive with sheer contempt.

I went and found another one.

Identical.

No, seriously:

http://www.amigans.net/modules/myalbum/photo.php?lid=248

Plugged it in. It worked.

Eh? Eh???? EHH????

http://www.amigans.net/modules/myalbum/photo.php?lid=250

Thats where I am at

@DaveP

Quote:

...like in "Entropy"?

@DaveP

I'm always surprised to read such posts as I didn't have *any* problems with my Sam667 I setup myself.
It's maybe because the devices (DVD,HD) I bought are working nicely.

In case it helps at all, TFTP booting usually looks for the image associated with the machine. It uses the MAC address for this, so the usual thing is to link (or copy) from your network boot image to the MAC address image so that it can find it. That's why it was looking for a .img file that wasn't on your CD, it was looking for your MAC address image file. Copy it to the name it's looking for and it should be fine. That's how you get lots of different machines network booting off one server, you make links from each computer address to a particular network kernel image.

@DaveP

You seem to be trying several boot devices when only one (SATA) is supported by the Sam's U-Boot.

Go back to the SATA CD/DVD, make sure that it is plugged into the J23 socket. Plug the SATA HDD into the J20 socket.

Plug your USB keyboard into the top USB connector (away from the board) and the mouse into the bottom connector (close to the board).

Make sure that you have a CD for the Sam. An OS4.1 CD for AmigaOne will not boot in the Sam and vice versa.

Forget all that business about "bootm", that's only for Linux. Simply power up, put the Sam distribution CD in the drive and reset. It should boot from the CD and let you start from there.

@tonyw

As I said, my SATA DVD drive isn't here yet.

Did I say bootm? Don't think I ever typed in bootm.

Hmm. Looks.

No?

So is this official:
Quote:

?

@Elwood

I don't understand it either... both times I only ordered the MB from Italy...

All my SATA ports are full and happy (2 x HD and 2 x DVDRW)

I haven't tried plugging the A1 IDE card into the Flex PCI yet but I do plan to at some stage... then I can plug 2 more DVDRWs in and possibly 2 of my 100 gig IDEs which hold storage... course, I'll need to rig up another powersupply etc but that's neither here nor there as the CEO of our business says!

err, btw DaveP

do not worry however long it takes you to get it sorted, it'll be well worth it and then you can join everyone else that looks at others and ponders the ramifications of how do they get into these sorts of situations

@tonyw
Quote:
When I was trying to resolve some issues on my SAM Flex, I discovered that I couldn't boot from the CD/DVD drive (J23) unless the HDD (J20) was also connected. I'm using my ?A1 right now (SAM is disconnected) so I can't confirm this right now. Will your SAM boot from the OS 4.1 CD if the SATA cable for the HDD is disconnected?

@tonyw
Quote:
That is mandatory as the UBoot doesn't support anything else. I do believe you must have both plugged in and powered on at the same time as well or it will not boot. Gotta love UBoot...

After UBoot has initialized all the ports work as normal, etc. This strange stuff is only needed to satisfy UBoot. I remember receiving my Sam and finding this out the hard way.

@DaveP

Sorry, I saw your "usbboot 500000 3:0" and read "bootm 500000 3:0".

Beside the point, however. I agree with Steven, I think that *the version of U-Boot supplied in the Sam* only supports booting from SATA (refer to heading "6. Firmware" in the Sam440ep booklet).

I've tried and failed to boot from USB, although I didn't try very hard.

@DaveP

I'm sorry to hear about your trouble with the SAM! I bought a complete pre-assembled system from Vesalia, and I've lived happily ever after

@DaveP

You can boot from a CD/DVD connected to a Sil0680 PCI controller this way:

- connect the CD/DVD as master on the Primary IDE Channel of the Sil0680 controller
- connect the SATA HD on J20
- enter UBoot menu, Boot Sequence / OS Multiboot Options and select SII PATA CDROM as Boot Device 1
- Save settings and reset

Now the Sam will recognize the CD/DVD and will load the kickstat files from the OS4.1 Install CD.

If, for any reasons, the boot procedure stops at the "Insert Disk" animation, try setting from the UBoot prompt:

sii0680ide_conf 2000
saveenv

Hope this helps

@m3x

...and with THAT ... its installed. Genius. Thank you.

@m3x

Ah, this is also good for me to know since I was simply going to throw caution to the wind and install my A1 IDE card in the SAM Flex PCI.

It's just a theory I have at this stage but I remember burning full DVDs in like under 10mins using IDE as opposed to 20 mins on SATA at the moment.

I have no idea why this would be the case.

If it works out ok, I'll leave SATA for the HDs, which is incredibility fast I must say. and attach my 2 IDE DVDRWs to the IDE card... not sure what I will do with 2 x brand new SATA DVDRWs though...