PLoP Boot Manager problem ?

[aismike]

Dear Elmar,
I'm finding myself in trouble trying to use your PLoP
Boot Manager.

First, let me try explaining my HW/SW situation and my
goal.

Hardware:
FUJITSU SIEMENS SCENIC T (mainboard FUJITSU SIEMENS D1214)
933 MHz Intel Pentium III
512 MB RAM
82801BA/BAM (ICH2/ICH2-M) USB UHCI Controller
            USB key : USB DISK Pro  (1GB)   
   Info : 077308600DC4
   USB Version : 2.00
   Product ID :   VEN_13FE, DEV_1D20, PRT_00
   Class : Storage

I prepared a normal floppy disk to boot FreeDOS, set up a 16MB RAM disk
and, at the beginning of AUTOEXEC.bat, if a USB drive is found
with a specific file in the root directory, continue loading
everything from that USB drive onto the RAM disk, to speed up
things considerably.
The USB key I use has been formatted exactly as the flopyy disk itself
and contains exactly the same files (plus some more, of course) :
it is also bootable and has been checked to work as intended on
machines which support booting from USB peripherals.

What happens is the following:
- if I boot from the FreeDOS floppy disk, everything goes smoothly,
  after the USB key is detected, everything gets copied from it
  to the RAM disk and I can start using FreeDOS normally;
- if I boot from a floppy disk which contains just the PLoP Boot
  Manager and choose to boot from the USB key, everything goes well
  until a copy of several ZIP files from the USB key to the RAM
  disk is requested (in the middle of Autoexec.BAT): randomly but
  quite often the copy stops in the middle of some file (not always
  the same) and the PC locks up.
  Notice that the same copy operation ALWAYS goes well if booting
  from the FreeDOS floppy disk (on the same PC), or booting directly
  from the USB key (on another, USB-2.0 compliant PC).

Any idea what might be the cause ? Maybe some timing issue while
reading from USB ? Any chance of turning up some kind of debugging
and/or logging option in PLoP Boot Manager, so that
I can try and pinpoint the problem ?

Sorry for the lengthy message and explanation: I hope to help you
make a great piece of code even better. And whenever you decide
to make PLoP a read/write driver for USB disks, count me in for a
purchase !

Cheers from pizza-land.

Michele Montagni

[Elmar]

hi,
can you post, or send me as private message the floppy image that i can try it at my pc's?

regards
elmar

[aismike]

hi,
can you post, or send me as private message the floppy image that i can try it at my pc's?

regards
elmar

will prepare and send it tomorrow; thanks for you interest.

Michele Montagni

[aismike]

can you post, or send me as private message the floppy image that i can try it at my pc's?

Sorry for the delay in sending (health problems in the family ...)
Here's a ZIP file containing the floppy image and a short explanation
of my tests. My HW setup is described in the first message of this thread. Any other info needed, just let me know.
Look forward to your diagnosis,

Michele Montagni

[Elmar]

hi, i tried it and it booted successfully with option 4 (with plop driver). i had no problems with the copy stuff.

[aismike]

hi, i tried it and it booted successfully with option 4 (with plop driver). i had no problems with the copy stuff.

Any chance of having a debug version of PLoP BM,which can output/log some kind of diagnostics to help me pinpoint the problem ?
This thing really puzzles me, since both the USB key and the PC itself
have given me NO problem whatsoever in any environment (Windows 2000, WIn XP, Linux, FreeDOS, etc.)  ...
Cheers,

Michele

[Elmar]

this is a test version
http://download.plop.at/files/tmp/plpbt-mike1.bin
you have to press "shift u"' to force usb 1.1 and using the uhci controller
you will see a lot of abcccccd ...
when it hangs, whats the last chars you see? i don't need to know how many "c" there are. if there are more than 2 then say many "c". "a" is the start of a sequence "d" is the end.

[aismike]

this is a test version
http://download.plop.at/files/tmp/plpbt-mike1.bin
you have to press "shift u"' to force usb 1.1 and using the uhci controller
you will see a lot of abcccccd ...
when it hangs, whats the last chars you see? i don't need to know how many "c" there are. if there are more than 2 then say many "c". "a" is the start of a sequence "d" is the end.

Thanks. I'll try and let you know.

Mike

[aismike]

this is a test version
http://download.plop.at/files/tmp/plpbt-mike1.bin
you have to press "shift u"' to force usb 1.1 and using the uhci controller
you will see a lot of abcccccd ...
when it hangs, whats the last chars you see? i don't need to know how many "c" there are. if there are more than 2 then say many "c". "a" is the start of a sequence "d" is the end.

Tried just once and it loops in an endless sequence of "c" , can't say what was the last operation attempted because it went too fast on the screen.

Let me know if I can try anything else.

What's the difference between simply choosing "USB". typing "shift-U" or
typing "ctrl-shift-U" ?

Cheers,

Mike

[Elmar]

ok, new version http://download.plop.at/files/tmp/plpbt-mike2.bin

What's the difference between simply choosing "USB". typing "shift-U" or
typing "ctrl-shift-U" ?

shift forces to use usb 1.1
ctrl waits before booting and let you continue the search for another mass storage device
"u" is the additional hotkey for usb. if you move the bar over the usb option then you can use the shift and ctrl key too.
see http://www.plop.at/en/bootmanager.html#bootmanager
number 2 and 2.1

[aismike]

Made some more test with the latest test version you sent me and came to the following (disappointing ...) conclusions:

- system stops 95% of the time at the "copy %AD%\ZIP\*.ZIP %MD%\"   statement in Autoexec.bat (where %AD%=C: and %MD% is whatever is the RAM disk);   if using the PLoP BM test version, it just outputs an endless  number of "c" characters;

- as I said, the USB device that I use is a 1GB, FAT32 Disk Pro key that contains   the same stuff as the floppy disk, plus many other relatively large ZIP  files in the ZIP directory: thus the contents that is read during that   suspect "copy %AD%\ZIP\*.ZIP %MD%\" statement is MUCH larger than the  one on the floppy disk. Also, it was added later than the rest, thus is   "futher down" from the "beginning" of the USB disk: can this matter someway ?
I don't know anything about the inner details of USB (apart from being VERY   complex ...), but is the USB disk accessed using LBA ? Can be the location  of files on the disk (i.e. , a large LBA) be a factor ? Are there any timing considerations while reading from a USB key/disk ?   

- is there any interaction between the presence of PLoP BM and EMM386 and/or the   RAM disk ? There are (very few) times that some program just loaded from C: terminate with "Illegal Intruction occurred" message; I have even had system lock with EMM386 fatal diagnostic or "MBR chain corrupted" error messages.

- even SLOWLY singlestepping thru the FreeDOS statement does not solve the  problems, but it only lessens them or moves them to other statements.   

What really puzzles me is that I've NEVER had any similar problems while booting "normally" from floppy disk and then accessing the USB key. The same USB key has been repeatedly read, written and tested under Windows XP and never failed. to be on the safe side of memory timing, I also ran a standalone memory test for hours, which
discovered nothing at fault. 

I suspect that this is rapidly turning in a nightmarish pain in the neck for you, so please don't hesitate to tell me there's nothing else you can do about that: I'll understand and simply write off the possibility of using your clever PLoP BM code with my specific hardware.
Should you ever decide and develop PLoP BM as a full read/write driver (even as a commercial piece of software), please do keep me posted.

Thanks for your kindness and support and best wishes.

Michele Montagni
   

[Elmar]

debugging without the hardware is always difficult. however, its a problem with my driver and not with your usb device.

if your computer has usb 2.0 then you can use the ehci driver, but you have to disable the ems driver to use it.

[aismike]

debugging without the hardware is always difficult. however, its a problem with my driver and not with your usb device.

if your computer has usb 2.0 then you can use the ehci driver, but you have to disable the ems driver to use it.

Sorry, no USB 2.0 on this PC, that's exactly the reason I wanted to use PLoP BM .
If you need me to do some other test, just let me know: I'd reaaly love to see your code working EVERY time ... 'specially on my HW ;-)))
Cheers,

Mike

[aismike]

Did another test with another USB key (Imation Nano 2GB, FAT32) having the same contents and this time, while booting thru PLop BM, the Kernel boots allright but immediately stops saying it can't find COMMAND.COM (which is right there in the root directory, of course).
Does this suggest some problems in FAT/fFAT32 handling in PLoP, maybe ?

Best wishes,

Mike

[Elmar]

Does this suggest some problems in FAT/fFAT32 handling in PLoP, maybe ?

no, the driver delivers only the sectors that are requested by dos. but to avoid geometry troubles use the lba versions of fat16/fat32

[aismike]

no, the driver delivers only the sectors that are requested by dos. but to avoid geometry troubles use the lba versions of fat16/fat32

Thanks for reply, will try preparing a key with another OS and booting it thru PLoP BM. I'll let you know the results.

Mike

[Elmar]

with your permission, i will place a stripped down version of your boot disk in the download area to give an example how to use plpdisd.

regards
elmar

[aismike]

with your permission, i will place a stripped down version of your boot disk in the download area to give an example how to use plpdisd.

regards
elmar

Sure, go ahead. It's still a work in progress, though, and far from a masterpiece ... ;-)))
Hope to see soon a new version of PLop BM to test.

Mike

[gzk101]

IF possible I will also test it,i hope the project will go Farther.

[aismike]

Performed another test by using the same Imation Nano 2GB USB key and putting an Ubuntu 8.10 distribution on it, which boots perfectly on a USB 2.0 PC. Using PLoP on my USB 1,0 machine, the booting stops immediately with the cursor under the first "Linux ..." line.
Cheers,

Mike   

[VV2006]

Deleted.

[aismike]

Elmar,
sorry to bug you again : despite the problems, the idea of PLop Boot Manager is too good to give up ...
If trying to boot from a USB stick, must it be formatted as a UFD-floppy, a UFD ZIP or a UFD  UDD ? While using RMPrepUSB and reading their docs, I understand the respective formts are quite different : does this make any difference for PLop BM ? do you suggest any specific format as better suited for PLoP BM ?
Thanks for your fine work, looking for next version to test ...

Mike

[Elmar]

hi,
i don't know what RMPrepUSB does. But you have to handle the USB stick like a hard disk.

best regards
elmar