The original owner suggested I remove the CMOS battery for a few minutes to reset the motherboard.

I stared at the battery for a bit and tugged on it a little. It seems pretty secured in there. I googled around on Sam440 battery replacement/removal and didn't find anything. The Sam440ep-flex manual doesn't discuss it either.

Any suggestions for the right way to remove it without breaking anything. Is there a release tab/lever/catch or something? I don't want to make a bad situation worse by breaking the motherboard.

What do you all think of the suggestion as well? Any shot of working? Is there a software option to reset to factory settings w/o removing the battery?

Cheers,
Sean

@Swisso

Let me know if you solve this. Other than Update 6 vs. FE, it sounds pretty similar to my CD/DVD situation.

@Hans

I tried s4sii_maxbus set at 2 and at 3 and didn't have any different results accessing the CD/DVD.

I tried GGGG and G00G rather than G000 for sii3114_ide_xfer and no difference either.

Cheers,
Sean

Thanks for all the replies so far everyone. There's been some good suggestions of things to check.

At this point. I think we have data points to all but rule out a hardware problem (maybe... but tell me if I'm wrong) since I've:

* Replaced the CD/DVD drive.
* Replaced the SATA cable.
* Replaced the power cable.
* Tried it on J21.
* Successfully booted a bootable CD off the CD/DVD attached to J23.

and since:

* MediaToolbox sometimes sees a 2nd device on 3 (~40% of the time), it just has garbarge for the device name
* MediaToolbox sometimes sees a 2nd device on 3 with the correct name (~10% of the time), and on these occasions if I use the "Eject" and "Inject" buttons, they work


I think it's pretty fair to say at this point that we have a working CD/DVD that the SAM440 sees as OK (it boots OS4.1 FE off it after all) but that OS4.1 Update 6 doesn't see it correctly.

So... any ideas or thoughts on diagnostics I should run in OS4? Or configs I should look at?

Am I simply misunderstanding what should happen when I put in a CD in OS4? I'm using a commercial Audio CD and a ISO burned CDR as my test disks. I'd expect both to get mounted to the Workspace after inserting them. When I insert them, there is about 5 seconds or so of activity on the drive, then nothing. Should I be doing something else after inserting them?

Anyone have any hypothesis for the odd results from MediaToolbox? I get mostly no 2nd device and occasionally it sees the CD/DVD cleanly, and occasionally it sees it with a garbage device name (see the screenshots from the original post).

Thanks for all the help so far. I hope to get this solved. I'm eager to use my new Sam440, but most the software I have for it is on CD!

Cheers,
Sean

@Severin

Thanks for the suggestion on the power cable. It was the last remaining thing that I hadn't swapped out. I swapped it out, and still have the same behavior. So I don't think the cable was bad.

I'm also swapping between an ASUS and a brand new LG, so I don't think it's a case of a bad drive or a dirty lens (both will boot the AS4.1 FE CD for example).

Cheers,
Sean

@Swisso

I haven't checked that the CD/DVD devs dosdriver is pointing to unit 3 rather than to unit 1. I didn't know to do that, but I also don't know how to do that. Can you describe the steps to check that?

Cheers,
Sean

@broadblues

I tried using connector J21 and adjusting the conf variable (I tried both 1200 and 1020 as the value, as I wasn't sure which was right). No more luck that way then when it was on J23... which makes me think connector J23 is OK (I can boot the OS4 FE CD off J23, so that seems to me a sign the hardware is OK).

Cheers,
Sean

@Severin

Thanks, I did replace the drive. I get the same behavior with an ASUS drive and an LG drive.

I'll try a different power cable.

Cheers,
Sean

@tonyw

As another test, I put in an Audio CD and ran PlayCD. Nothing. As far as I can tell it behaves like there's no CD.

I also ran AmiDVD and it says "no CD/DVD devices found".

Cheers,
Sean

Tony,

Thanks for the response. I put in a CD (data) and waited a few minutes. Nothing.

It could be a SATA cable, but I've tried 2 different ones. And the fact that it booted OS4.1 Final Edition makes me think the SATA cable is OK.

Cheers,
Sean

Hi all,

I have a new (to me) Sam440ep-flex running AmigaOS4 Update 6. It has an ASUS (or an LG) SATA DVD/CD drive that I can't access from AmigaOS4. The SATA cable for the CD drive is connected to J23 as the manual status.

It seems to be OK at boot time:
http://cl.ly/image/0O0j040b1n0p

But then when I put in a CD… there's no change in AmigaOS4. Presumably I should see it mounted, or be able to access it in DirMaster or something. I can't.

When I run media toolbox… I get erratic behavior. About 50% of the time it only shows the HD on the controller:
http://cl.ly/image/1I3t1s1a2I3x

About 40% of the time, it shows a 2nd device that is the CD, but it's shown as jumbled garbage:
http://cl.ly/image/2e1C3z2E3K1n
http://cl.ly/image/0v060M3t1k3K

About 10% of the time, it seems to be ok:
http://cl.ly/image/0W413n3E3l1u
And in these OK instances I can use the "eject" and "inject" buttons successfully.

These different results are just from me opening media toolbox repeatedly. Each time I open it, it's one of these variations. I'm not changing anything when I get a different result, just opening it again.

Here is the printenv output from boot:
http://cl.ly/image/3J2k2z2F1a32

sii3114ide conf as 1002 seems correct. The "1002" code means:
1: HDD connected to port 0
0: nothing on port 1
0: nothing on port 2
2: a CD-ROM drive on port 3

As a final test, I tried booting the AmigaOS4.1 Final Edition CD. It's able to boot off of it, which is a good sign presumably, that the drive is hooked up properly and the hardware is all OK. I can't complete the install because it has a Radeon 5450 in it right now, so it freezes launching kickstart:
http://cl.ly/image/220p3z0q1e2m

I thought I'd mention it as an interesting data point as it seems to point to the hardware being OK and this being a software problem.

To be sure I'm not just dealing with a damaged/bad drive, I replaced the ASUS drive with a new LG drive, it had the exact same behavior. To further eliminate a hardware problem, I swapped out the SATA cable for a new one. Same behavior persisted.

Do you have any ideas? Anything else I should be trying in terms of setup or tests on the AmigaOS software side (this is my first experience with AmigaOS4… I'm a classic guy up to this point).

Cheers,
Sean