| Is the Memory On My IceDrake V4 Faulty? | |
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Roy Krister Ellingsen
Posts 5
31 Oct 2024 23:28
| Hi. First of all sorry for writing this here, but I was unable to log into Discord. I've been experiencing odd freezes and crashes and thought maybe it was one or two of the many programs I've added to my Workbench 3.1 installation. Then I ran memcheck from Aminet and it produced 128 errors after it was done testing the fastRAM. Then I tested the memory with AmigaTestKit and it froze my A1200 almost immediately it started testing. I've run this test without the IceDrake card installed and with only the 2MB Chipmem it gave no errors and memory test was fine. So I tested filling up the RAM disk with 488MB of data, but around 468MB full the Amiga either freezes with no error messages or I get a "Recoverable alert" and the Amiga still freeze up. Any ideas as to whether this is some known issue with this type of (or amount of) RAM on an accellerator board, or have I've been unlucky having a faulty unit? Thanks for any help, it's much appreciate! - Roy
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Gunnar von Boehn
(Apollo Team Member)
Posts 6283
03 Nov 2024 20:58
| 1st question:
Did you ran the memory test from Workbench?
If YES then did you stop all DMA before starting the test?
If you for example have Network running then the network chip will DMA copy ethernet packets to its allocated RAM buffers.Then of course a memory test will just fail.
This is fully normal and expected.
I would suggest to come to Discord for Support, you can use your webbrowser to access discord - this should work out of the box for you.
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Roy Krister Ellingsen
Posts 5
16 Nov 2024 01:18
| I ran some more memory tests with Amiga Test Kit and it's not the fastmem as I first suspected, as I had only selected to test all memory initially. So when testing individual memory regions both chipmem and fastmem are okay, but slowmem is where the Amiga freeze up mere seconds into the test. When testing in Workbench I didn't stop all DMA and to be honest I don't know how. Sort of trying to re-learn the Amiga :), so I'll have to get back to that. I've tested with Amiga Test Kit both from Workbench and from boot up floppy, though, but it still happens. Considering the symptoms of my Amiga I wonder if it could be this particular A1200 model that is in need of the "timing fix" I've read about, but I could really use a second opinion on that. I'll try Discord again soon and take it from there.
Thanks!
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Gunnar von Boehn
(Apollo Team Member)
Posts 6283
19 Nov 2024 16:54
| Roy Krister Ellingsen wrote:
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but slowmem is where the Amiga freeze up mere seconds into the test.
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Ok
Question 1) in which mode do you run the System. In CRT or Full Saga mode with 6 MB chip? Question 2) How much slow mem does the Test "assume" you have?
Can you post the memory regions?
Maybe the test is wrong guessing your memory range ...
if this happens it might do a memory test into IDE chipset ... which is tragic.
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Roy Krister Ellingsen
Posts 5
22 Nov 2024 20:35
| I run in CRT and the test assumes I have 1.75 MB slowmem. Before starting the memtest it displays the lower region as being 00c00000 and upper as 00dbffff. Almost immediately after running the memtest it freeze up at regions 0xd80000-0xdbffff.
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Gunnar von Boehn
(Apollo Team Member)
Posts 6283
23 Nov 2024 05:28
| Roy Krister Ellingsen wrote:
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I run in CRT and the test assumes I have 1.75 MB slowmem. Before starting the memtest it displays the lower region as being 00c00000 and upper as 00dbffff. Almost immediately after running the memtest it freeze up at regions 0xd80000-0xdbffff.
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Yes ok, as I assumed the test is mistaken and wrong here.
The Amiga 1200 IDE chipset is located at $DA0000 which is in the middle of the memory boundaries the test uses.
Its logically that the Amiga will crash using these boundaries.
I can only suggest to use a better memory test program.
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Nick Fellows
Posts 187
23 Nov 2024 20:57
| I remember when i used to write assembly on the amiga memory filling certain regions of memory would crash the machine, sometimes in fun an interesting ways.
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Roy Krister Ellingsen
Posts 5
07 Dec 2024 00:22
| A better memory test program would probably skip over these bounderies, but I'd be interested in learning what those might be having tried Advanced Amiga Analyzer, Amiga Test Kit and MemCheck where all three produces errors or lock-ups of the Amiga. Then again my Amiga crashes randomly at performed operations (never when sitting idle), and along with it the RAM disk keep crashing the Amiga consistently when it fills up to a certain amount of megabytes. This alone demands some strong convincing that it has nothing at all to do with a faulty memory module on the IceDrake card. I can only judge by the absence of posts in this thread that mine is not a common issue. I do not believe I made a wrong purchase with this board, but I am believing I got a faulty unit.
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Gunnar von Boehn
(Apollo Team Member)
Posts 6283
08 Dec 2024 09:02
| Roy Krister Ellingsen wrote:
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A better memory test program would probably skip over these bounderies, but I'd be interested in learning what those might be having tried Advanced Amiga Analyzer, Amiga Test Kit and MemCheck where all three produces errors or lock-ups of the Amiga.
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Let me briefly explain how the Amiga is designed.
Amiga is a computer with both memory and with hardware registers all mapped in the address space.
In the memory area of $DAxxxx is your IDE drive.
In the memory area of $DDxxxx could be another IDE drive.
In the memory area of $DFFxxx are the Blitter,Copper and many other registers.
In the memory area of $BFxxxx are the CIA chip, this means serial, parallel, keyboard, and floppy parts
And you have more registers for PCMCIA port in the $DExxxx range and more.It should be easy to understand that if a memory test "runs" over any these regions, this can cause interrupt go wild, this can cause DMA go rampage over your computer - of course the Amiga will then have to fail and crash and halt.
This is 100% expected and normal behavior.
May I suggest that you join Discord, I think we can much easier help you there. Joining Discord channel should be very easy. You can do this simply from a webbrowser.
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Aros Sg
Posts 1
11 Dec 2024 07:35
| It's unlikely this memory tests "guess" the memory ranges to test themselves. They'll just look them up in SysBase (exec.library). And for whatever reason on his system he'll have one in there which is wrong. With a tool like Scout you can see the memory ranges "registered" in the system (exec.library).
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Isabel V.B.
Posts 13
11 Dec 2024 08:19
| aros sg wrote:
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It's unlikely this memory tests "guess" the memory ranges to test themselves. They'll just look them up in SysBase (exec.library). And for whatever reason on his system he'll have one in there which is wrong. With a tool like Scout you can see the memory ranges "registered" in the system (exec.library).
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Thank you, this is a good point you make.
If the Amiga installation god knows why, uses wrong / illegal memory ranges then of course the system can never run stable
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Information about the Apollo CPU and FPU.