Iyonix Restart Fails.

I’ve installed the Tungsten 5.22 ROM image on my Iyonix. After mouse and keyboard not appearing responsive I tried pressing escape lots of times during boot up, something running was causing an issue which I successfully escaped out of. I then ran the update boot program from the hard disc image. So I probably did the installation in the wrong order. This seemed to fix things but whenever I do a restart the computer screen goes black and the Iyonix doesn’t restart. Looking at a list of changes I saw that work had been done on DHCP so I tried disabling networking, and the machine didn’t restart. That was a bad guess but pretty close as it turned out, so I re-enabled networking TCP/IP and turned off Access for shared drive access, this fixed the restart issue but I would like to be able to share my drives and would also like to be able to restart my machine.

Historically the reason I upgraded from a very old version of the ROM was to fix a LanMan98 (Omniclient) issue so I could get access to a Linux samba share like I could on my Raspberry PI. After the Rom upgrade which I think was version 5.20 I started again with a new !Boot and copied across my settings. Everything worked including Omniclient but what I noticed then was the Shared option when I menued over the drive was always greyed out. I looked at my Raspberry PI and same issue. The menu option is now not greyed out with version 5.22 so wonder if I need to fix something with Acorn Access because with version 5.22 the Restart button doesn’t do the restart cycle unless Acorn Access is disabled.

BTW: The updates to the Roms fixed a long standing issue where on restart I got a garbled screen and had to hit the reset button which was annoying so I appreciated that this was fixed and this was a really nice bonus surprise especially when I had a fully working Omniclient. I came very close to buying a new graphics card at one of the Wakefield shows because of the garbled screen issue. The Omniclient issue was definitely a fix in the ROM and took me a number of hours to diagnose that updating the ROM would fix the issue I was having with Omniclient it saw the samba share after only updating the rom in a test before updating any applications or !boot.

Now with version 5.22 I notice that when I power on I get a flashing cursor for a few seconds in the top left before the start up text with amount of memory etc. appears. The cursor didn’t appear before, is that by design and part of the 5.22 change? I’m asking in case I have an issue with the upgrade that I’ve done because like the Shared option been greyed out, been ungreyed in version 5.22 I wonder if they are not necessarily a configuration issue or a lack of understanding on my part.

Thinking about these small issues perhaps they could be documented for example if there was a small line of text in the help file for the ROM upgrades to say update boot first, restart machine, then update roms. Or for like the C++ toolkit say that the latest version of PDF viewer is required to view the new manuals. I spent quite a while working that one out too.

I’d appreciate it if someone could advise on what I should try next regarding the restart issue. Hope I haven’t clouded the issue by going into the various issues I’ve had which have been fixed by Rom updates. This background information may help but I guess I’m really trying to say well done and keep up the good work. I made a small donation to say thanks, it was all I could afford because I am between jobs at the moment.

Thanks,
Andrew.

Have you got the 5.20 disc image properly installed? That’s a big difference between 5.20 and earlier versions. I’m not clear from the above what you’re upgrading from.

Check the unplugged modules list. If you had something disabled in the old setup then the module numbering in 5.22 may be disabling something different now.

!Verma will show you the full list plugged and unplugged and allow you to change the state.

Thanks, !Verma is a very useful program for Rom upgrades and saved me a lot of time. To cut a long story short on the diagnosis here are some of the things I tried. I definetly upgraded the !boot sequence and went from version 5.20 to 5.22.

I can’t remember the exact order.

Modules looked okay nothing really unplugged apart from DHCP and ShareFS which plugged themselves in when enabled in !Boot.
I renamed !Boot to _!Boot.
I redownloaded the hard disc image again (a check sum program would be useful too where you drag and drop the zip file and get the checksum so I can compare it to the checksum on this site).
I ran a CMOS reset and the issue with restart went away.
I redownloaded the rom, ran it again, it said it was already up to date and somehow checked the checksum for me saying there was no point upgrading as two images were identical. I put on 5.20 and then 5.22 (Full Transfer not sure what that means but it seems to work) to force a reflash and to be absolutely sure that the Rom update had worked.
I then looked at was was running predesktop and started putting my old predesktop stuff back in. I became particularly interested in !MiscSetup and Aemulor because the same issue with restarts came back when I put back my old !Boot sequence PreDesktop bits.
I installed a !Boot directory that I’d just downloaded again today and added Aemulor back in with and then without my configuration. I was reaching the conclusion that my Aemulor configuration which was setup how I needed it wasn’t liking the new ROM (because the only change from the downloaded !Boot was just adding Aemulor into the new !Boot and the restart issue reoccurred). However I couldn’t do anything about it so stopped drilling down with the diagnosis at that point because my version of Aemulor was 2.34 is the latest vesion for the Iyonix. Plus on one occasion during many restarts Aemulor with it’s out of the box configuration seemed to cause the same issue. Since I can’t live without Aemulor I had to reflash 5.20.

I haven’t put back my boot sequence for 5.20 but have left it at 5.22, noticing that the 5.22 !boot upgrader backed stuff up (and hopefully I’m okay to run 5.22 !Boot with 5.20 roms) and I’d already updated all my applications. This seemed to be a good setup though as I get Status button on Networking in !Boot which I didn’t have before plus other 5.22 goodies. I lose the speedier filer redraws though which come with 5.22 but having said that when I went from an earlier version of Risc OS I lost Geminus which I used to speed up redraws on the desktop previously because of the horrible yellow title bars that were rendered when I originally updated from a very old version of Risc OS to 5.20. I also lost a brilliant filer shortcut program which really speeded up work because unfortunately the author doesn’t update it, last time I checked, for later versions of Risc OS. Very sad that, it was a great utility perhaps he should update it and sell it. Because I needed !Omniclient working though I was okay about the 5.20 upgrade in fact I was over the moon but can’t afford to lose Ameulor so had to revert back to 5.20 this morning.

So basically the problem was fixed by resetting the CMOS and not installing Aemulor into the 5.22 !Boot. However I ended up rolling back to 5.20 roms and using the !Boot I’d built from scratch, cleaned and then upgraded so I could have Ameulor and the other goodies.

My Iyonix is working perfectly now. Thanks for your help.

Andrew.

Ah, Aemulor and Geminus. Both do rather clever things that may have fallen foul of changes in the OS.
IIRC Geminus had a problem with a recent change. You could try with that left out.

Adrian is around so you could ask direct.

Okay thanks but I’ll leave my Iyonix on 5.20 until I have some more time.