The solution to my earlier problem of no output after the installation of Amiga OS4.0 on the new AmigaOne XE was…. to buy ANOTHER next-gen Amiga. Yes, I actually did this.
But before that, let me explain what else happened.
First, I went to Hyperion’s support forums as well as Amigaworld’s forums and asked around. Before I had the blanks screen, I was getting the “insert floppy” animation.
This turned out to be a harddrive configuration issue. One of the many frustrating things about some Next Gen Amiga’s is U-BOOT. This is sorta like BIOS or UEFI on other computers. I had v1.1.1 installed, which I’d heard was the latest “official” version but not necessarily the latest version that existed.
The way the Amiga guys set it up, it needed a few settings in order to find a bootable disk. First off was the conf setting. Since I was using the internal ide controller, which had 2 connectors on the motherboard (headers), each capable of having a master and slave device, I had to tell the system how this was set up. The setting (when using setenv command from u-boot command line) was called a1ide_conf. There are 4 digits. Each digit can have one of 3 values: 0=nothing attached, 1=HDD, 2=CD/DVD. The digits are primary-master, primary-slave, secondary-master, secondary slave. Eventually, my connections were to have the 80GB harddrive set to master on the primary connection and the DVDWriter to be master on secondary connection, no slave drives in either. Therefore, my a1ide_conf setting was 1020.
This helped. No more “insert floppy” animation. During the install of OS4.0, it brought up a program called MediaToolBox. The first step was to edit the RDB (rigid disk block, section at the start of a disk that describes the disk layout, needed for Amiga OS’s). One of the options was to install a Second Level Bootloader (slb) into the RDB. Looks similar to this image:
Then, the first partition I created in the partition layout had to be set to be bootable, similar to this:
That was when it got to the point of having a blank screen on boot up.
Most of the advice I was getting was related to making sure that the harddrive settings were right, which included another uboot configuration that was called a1ide_xfer. I set all 4 values to zero (a1ide_xfer = 0000) this told the system to use the best available transfer settings for the harddrive.
Still no go. A few said that the screenmode may be wrong for the monitor. The boot CD showed okay so how could that be?
Well, back to my original statement, I ended up buying a Micro-A1C from Eyetech, with a pre-installed 4.1 system. I thought the OS 4.1 CD would solve my problems. Nope, installed it onto the AmigaOne XE and still blank screen.
So, I booted into the AmigaOne, bypassing the startup script (will post a tip on that later), and listed the contents of the startup-script and typed them in one by one until I got the offending line: loadWB.
I then had the idea that maybe the video driver and screenmode prefs were the problem. Everything worked until those were needed. So, I backed up the following files (after booting into the prompt only): Radeon 9000 and Radeon 9000.info in the DEVS:Monitors driver were moved to STORAGE:Monitors, and the screenmode.prefs in SYS:Prefs/Env-Archive/Sys/ were renamed and the ones on the install CD were used (Radeon instead of Radeon 9000).
Well finally, I got into the UI on reboot without using the CD.
There’s still the issue of resolutions and settings but I’ll stop here for now. At least I can see things even though I’m only using 1024×768 on a monitor capable of 1920×1200. Another log coming for that though.
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