PB180 ZuluSCSI disk sleep issues?

[flimshaw]

My Powerbook 180 restoration continues apace. I recently replaced the ancient spinny drive with an RP2040 based ZuluSCSI from rabbit hole (https://store.rabbitholecomputing.c...-2-5-inch-p/zuluscsi-rp2040-laptop-2.5-in.htm). Got it up and running without too much trouble, and installed System 7.1. Everything seemed ok, but it appears that whenever the computer puts the display / drive to sleep, the drive doesn't wake back up again. The mouse still works etc, but if I try to navigate to finder or do just about anything it hangs and I have to power off and on.

Has anyone else run into this issue? Are there and specific zuluscsi.ini settings I need to add for Powerbook sleeping to work properly?

Thanks!
-Charlie

 

[3lectr1cPPC]

I've heard of this being an issue on different SD card adapters before, I'm guessing it's a problem across the board. Pretty sure you can disable the disk sleep from the powerbook control panel or one of the other control panels. There's little benefit to having the disk sleep enabled on a solid state adapter, the reason it was there in the first place was to save on battery power when you had a drive spinning which sucked a lot of it. Not sure if that will fix sleep mode causing problems for you though. I don't think I've had that issue with mine, but I've only got BlueSCSI units running in my PowerBooks.

@rabbitholecomputing

 

[rabbitholecomputing]

Hi @flimshaw, as @3lectr1cPPC points out, the benefit of hard drive sleep is diminished to nearly zero when there isn't any mechanical spindle. At idle, ZuluSCSI RP2040 draws about 10-20 milliamps @ 5 volts DC. Therefore, it would be useful to know if this problem simply goes away if you disable drive sleep. The SD card itself could also be playing a role. I see that you e-mailed us earlier this morning. A debug log from the ZuluSCSI, where you put it to sleep and then wake the machine back up, may be helpful in further understanding what's going on at the code level of the ZuluSCSI itself.

If you compare that to the original spinning rust drive you replaced it with, which likely has its power consumption characteristics stated on the top label of the hard drive, you'll see that the power consumption delta between it and ZuluSCSI RP2040 are absolutely massive.

 

[flimshaw]

Thanks a lot for the reply (and the email)! I totally agree, I'm not really concerned about the sleeping from a power perspective. Being able to sleep the laptop is a nice to have, but if I could just stop it from trying to power down the drive and hanging that would be fine.

I couldn't find a setting in any of the control panels in the system that was specificly "put drives to sleep" on System 7.1. I basically turned off all options about sleeping / dimming, so I will let you know if that's enough to solve it. The SD card is an 8gb one I purchased with the Zulu, but if there's anything I can test on it let me know. Or, is there another OS I should install? I just went with the PB180 System disks.

It's been a busy day but I'll hopefully have some time to play around tonight after futzing with power settings and see if it's stopped putting it to sleep. If it's still acting up, I'll turn on debugging and see what I can figure out and share. The delay and attention settings seemed like they might be promising, if it's some race condition that's only present on spinny drives. The plastic on these things is just so fragile though, I'd love to not have to open it up too much.

OK, thanks again, I'll report back.

 

[flimshaw]

I cracked it open once more and just turned everything back to the defaults. I also removed a CD image and a Zip Disk image I had on there that I hadn't mounted yet just to cut down on variables.

It does seem to boot fine with a stock zuluscsi.ini after updating it. I did reduce the sync scsi mode down to 5 from 10 on a whim, and it seems a bit more stable. I'm still not able to sleep, and unfortunately it seems like the debug log gets overwritten when the computer wakes back up. Here's one of those logs. It seems like the computer wakes up, the Zulu initializes, and then it just sits around until I power it off:

[10ms] Platform: ZuluSCSI RP2040
[10ms] FW Version: 23.07.01-release Jun 30 2023 16:12:07
[11ms] DIP switch settings: debug log 0, termination 1
[11ms] SCSI termination is enabled
[12ms] Flash chip size: 16384 kB
[14ms] SCSI target/disk mode selected by DIP switch, acting as a SCSI disk
[38ms] SD card detected, FAT32 volume size: 7572 MB
[39ms] SD MID: 0x03, OID: 0x53 0x44
[39ms] SD Name: SS08G
[39ms] SD Date: 6/2020
[40ms] SD Serial: 0x29FE5B77
[42ms] Reading configuration from zuluscsi.ini
[43ms] Active configuration:
[45ms] -- SelectionDelay = 255
[46ms] -- EnableUnitAttention = No
[47ms] -- EnableSCSI2 = Yes
[48ms] -- EnableSelLatch = No
[48ms] -- MapLunsToIDs = No
[49ms] -- EnableParity = Yes
[168ms] Finding HDD images in directory /:
[169ms] -- Opening /HD4.img for id:4 lun:0
[229ms] ---- Read prefetch enabled: 8192 bytes
[230ms] -- Opening /HD5.img for id:5 lun:0
[284ms] ---- Read prefetch enabled: 8192 bytes
[285ms] -- Opening /HD3.img for id:3 lun:0
[339ms] ---- Read prefetch enabled: 8192 bytes
[340ms] -- Opening /HD0.img for id:0 lun:0
[391ms] ---- Read prefetch enabled: 8192 bytes
[392ms] -- Opening /HD2.img for id:2 lun:0
[450ms] ---- Read prefetch enabled: 8192 bytes
[451ms] -- Opening /HD1.img for id:1 lun:0
[511ms] ---- Read prefetch enabled: 8192 bytes
[518ms] -- Platform supports ROM drive up to 16028 kB
[518ms] ---- ROM drive image not detected
[519ms] SCSI ID:0 BlockSize:512 Type:0 Quirks:1 ImageSize:262144kB
[519ms] SCSI ID:1 BlockSize:512 Type:0 Quirks:1 ImageSize:262144kB
[520ms] SCSI ID:2 BlockSize:512 Type:0 Quirks:1 ImageSize:262144kB
[521ms] SCSI ID:3 BlockSize:512 Type:0 Quirks:1 ImageSize:262144kB
[521ms] SCSI ID:4 BlockSize:512 Type:0 Quirks:1 ImageSize:262144kB
[522ms] SCSI ID:5 BlockSize:512 Type:0 Quirks:1 ImageSize:262144kB
[623ms] Initialization complete!
[9644ms] WARNING: Detected supply voltage drop to 2687mV. Verify power supply is adequate.

Again, sleep isn't the hugest deal as long as the drive doesn't power-down/spin-down and then not wake back up. So far so good there! I also tried installing a CD driver so I may give the ISO one more go.

 

[flimshaw]

AHhh one more thing: I definitely did get this to sleep and restore from the Zulu like one or two times out of 20, but not stable with any particular settings, and most of the time it just launches the grey screen with a cursor. After a second or two I hear the hard drive click once and then it just sits. But it *did* work once or twice, which is what kinda made me think it was a race condition or something related to how quickly the drive mounts vs the spinny drive? Wild guesses here.

 

[flimshaw]

OK checking in again here after a few weeks, and still no sleep till brooklyn over here. I tried dropping a new PRAM battery in just for fun, and also tried running with a single HD image on there and a few other random things, but I still just get a grey screen after rebooting. If I cmd-alt-escape it lets me attempt to force-quit on finder, so the computer is sorta up but not able to talk to the HD.

So, if anybody has a PB180 that sleeps properly with an RP2040 ZuluSCSI, I'd love to take a peek at your .ini settings. Thanks!

 

[3lectr1cPPC]

You’re not the only one, by BlueSCSI V2 equipped PowerBook 170 locked up on my top last night right when it would have been trying to restart the drive.

 

[SuperSVGA]

It might be the same sleep issue that the Macintosh Portable has with ZuluSCSI RP2040/BlueSCSI v2. I think the transceivers assert SCSI control lines on power up because the RP2040 hasn't initialized, which causes the SCSI controller to fail initialization.

 

[Admiral Ackbar]

OK checking in again here after a few weeks, and still no sleep till brooklyn over here. I tried dropping a new PRAM battery in just for fun, and also tried running with a single HD image on there and a few other random things, but I still just get a grey screen after rebooting. If I cmd-alt-escape it lets me attempt to force-quit on finder, so the computer is sorta up but not able to talk to the HD.

So, if anybody has a PB180 that sleeps properly with an RP2040 ZuluSCSI, I'd love to take a peek at your .ini settings. Thanks!

I have a PB180 and just ordered the same ZuluSCSI that you have, can report-in on my success level later.
Thanks.

 

[Sideburn]

Yes it’s the same issue as with the portable. I solved it on my portable by jumping power from the floppy drive over to the BlueSCSI so it boots up immediately upon wake before the system tries to “spin up” the drive.

I’m not sure where to tap power on the PowerBook 180 would be though but mine has the same problem. If you wait about 3 minutes after waking from sleep it will finally come back to life.