Amiga Forever 2005 linux boot disc & USB kb/mouse

[goalive]

Hi guys,

Well I received my Amiga Forever 2005 CD in the mail, and it works great both on the PC and when booting off the CD into Linux and then Amiga Forever.

The only problem with using the CD as a boot disk is that it doesn't recognize my USB keyboard and mouse... it's plugged into a KVM switch, and while I have an old PS/2 keyboard I don't own a PS/2 mouse any longer. Since it's Linux is there anything easy I can do to enable the USB mouse?

BTW, my used Adaptec 2940 SCSI controller arrived in the mail today. I'm getting ready to plug in my old 20 megabyte hard drive from my Amiga 1000!!! I am so excited! It hasn't been powered up in over ten years, so I dunno if it's gonna work... but I really hope so.

I'd like to power on my old Amiga 1000 SCSI drive from within the Linux boot emulation, because I don't know if this will work the same under Windows. Also, it's Workbench 2.04 so I'm hoping it will still work run under 3.1...

If you think the old drive should work just fine under Windows - Amiga emulation, let me know and I'll try it that way!! I have some old wordperfect documents I wrote over 10 years ago and I'm excited to see them again!

thanks,

Kelly Martin

[InTheSand]

Hi,

Good luck with your old A1000's SCSI drive! This should also work fine from the Windows version of UAE. I recently did this the other way round, copying a load of Amiga stuff to an FFS-formatted drive so I could do a bulk transfer of files from my emulated UAE environment to my A3000.

However, a word of caution: if your A1000's drive works, great, but the first step I'd recommend is to copy the entire drive's contents to one of your PC drives, BEFORE you go off looking at old files, etc., just in case the drive dies.

 - Ali

[goalive]

Great advice, thanks. I'll try this tomorrow and then let you know what happens.

A friend of mine told me about a trick he used with old NeXT hard drives (SCSI) that wouldn't start. He'd turn the power off and twist the drives in his hands with his wrists, in a lateral motion, similar to when they spin... just to get them used to spinning again. He said often that helped. Hopefully I won't have to do this, but either way if it fires up I'll copy everything over as fast as I can.

Cheers,

Kelly

[goalive]

Here's a big update... after 10 years being unplugged, the drive still worked!! COOL... powered up immediately, I am so impressed!

A couple of observations about my new-old Amiga:

1. I got a bunch of "cannot copy file - disk full" messages, but most of these were due to filename incompatibilities and nothing to do with my destination disk being full.

2. I'm a bit disappointed my old WordPerfect word processor doesn't execute on Kickstart 3.1... it worked fine on 1.3 and 2.04, but there's no 2.04 emulation on the Amiga Forever disk. Did WordPerfect ever make an updated version? I know they stopped making it for the Amiga not very long after they started, so I doubt it... but have to ask if anyone has a newer version for Amiga.

3. I discovered that I was using some kind of on-the-fly file compression scheme, so most of my old documents are compressed and currently unreadable in native format. Unfortunately, I don't remember how I did this, or how to get the file-based compression working again... I'll poke around and see if I can figure it out. Any suggestions where I should look? It's been over 10 years and I just can't remember where I configured this.

Otherwise, I just had to say that I'm incredibly impressed that I have my old Amiga 1000 back and running again... under emulation. And my old hard drive still works, yay.

Kelly