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ScuzzBlog: Diaries August 2017

Entry 13th August 2017: Post: 1


Strange GVP Day


Hi

I completed the task of cataloguing all my cover disks by lunchtime 
today and decided to set too on the mountain of copied disks and home 
grown disks that I have. This is a very large challenge because I have 
no idea of the real content of most of the disks, nor whether they work 
and or can be read. Only thing to do is check each and every one of them 
Trouble is you wouldn't want to ruin your best floppy drive on these 
disks. Also, although I had planned using a down stairs machine for this 
I am struggling coping with the large volume of disks and so carrying on 
using the large table seems the best option.

And so I decided to set up a 500Plus with a GVP HDII sidecar running 
2.1. Most of these disks are from the Amiga 500 era and 1.3 could be 
more stable, but the OS is just so poor at interrogating disks. 2.1 is 
way better and still old enough to support most of the disks.

So I plugged in the drive and it powered up and loaded a very very 
strange Workbench. Not of my making and obviously the love of someone's 
Amiga world at some time. Having plugged in and got underway I decided 
to try and hook up a second floppy. This is where the problems started. 
For some reason I got a power loss and the GVP struggled to power up. It 
also threw out an error message and checksum. I wasn't convinced there 
was anything wrong.

I switched the power supply and that worked. However the external floppy 
drive threw up its own errors and refused to load disks. So I decided to 
swap out for another 500Plus. Plugged in and all was fine but still 
couldn't get the external floppy to work. I then tried the internal 
floppy and it also refused to load disks. I then got a brown out.. power 
loss on the GVP and it also threw up a checksum.

I swapped out for another 500Plus. We cleared the loading and boot and 
power issues on the GVP but still couldn't see the floppy drives. Could 
I be that unlucky ? I split the sidecar and loaded the floppy disk and 
the computer saw the disks no problem. I reconnected the external floppy 
of which I had tried several and it too worked. I plugged in the GVP and 
the drives became unusable.

So I stepped back one notch to the previous 500Plus with the power 
issues and hooked up one of the A590s that I formatted last week. Fired 
up first time and what is more the floppy drives were fully accessible. 
I swapped out to other Plus' and they too worked. No power issues and no 
floppy issues.

I gave up with the GVP. I really have no idea what is the problem. It is 
as if it needs a specific 500 to work with its system. It really is the 
oddest of beasts. The OS and all the elaborate icons and pointing tools 
make for one weird setup.

Happy now and ready to start checking through these disks. I need to use 
the external floppy cus the disks will degrade the drive to the point 
where I need to keep cleaning it. I never have this issue with my own 
disks. Only other peoples.

scuzz



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Last updated 13/08/2017

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