Strangely modded A1200 + HD ? ( Newbie alert )

Hi !

I just got an amiga 1200 with a conner peripherals 120 MB IDE 3,5 hard drive. ( well, the 'big, PC' kind )

I had a CDTV and an A500 before, but this is my first try with hard drives and amigas.

I know that Amiga has space for smaller drives, but when I opened up mine, I found a standard pc HD lying on a sheet of paper, connected to a PC-like power supply plug ( i opened up an a600 wchich is supposed to have similar controllers, and it didn't have such cables ), the plug came out from the area of the floppy drive, while the IDE cable was marked with a marker ( "HD CABLE" ), and had it's red ribbon cut ( the one that marks the 'zero' pin on the ide connector ) - in two places . Anyway, is this a mod of some kind ? Because I am able to connect this very conner HD to my pc and it fits ( and works ), and I am pretty sure the drive sizes were different.
BTW, what's the max capacity of the HD that the amiga can adress ?

[Thomas]

The A600 and A1200's internal IDE connector is for 2.5" HDs (those that fit into a laptop). But 3.5" HDs can be connected through an adapter without problems. The laptop HDs get their power through the HD cable, 3.5" ones need an extra power cable. Nothing unusual about this.

Now, the cut wire is the reset line. Cutting it prevents the drive from spinning down when you reset the computer. Lots of PC HDs spin up too slow for AmigaOS (because a PC BIOS usualy waits ages before it starts booting). This is a hack, but not unusual, too.

The maximum HD size AmigaOS 3.1 can handle is 4GB. But there are software patches to overcome this limit. E.g. IDEfix and OS3.9.

Bye,
Thomas

Thanks ! I can now put in my old 2 gb drive.
Can I format it, install the system etc. using WinUAE, and then mount the drive in the Amiga ? ( well, I know I can, but will it be bootable ? )

Thanks again,
KraZ

[Vincent]

When you install the drive under WinUAE, remember to tick the "bootable" box in HDToolbox and it should work ok.

If not, you can use the floppy disks to boot on the Amiga, run HDToolbox and tick the "Bootable" box there.  This will NOT destroy the data on the drive.

The next time you reset, the HD should boot fine.

[amigamad]

I bought an a1200 wich had a 3.5 inch 100mb maxtor hd in and and had a power lead connected to the floppy drive but the idiot i got it from cut all of the clock pins off . :-D