**Need Setup HELP** with Classic Amiga 2000 HARD DISK (Bridgeboard)

[Pat the Cat]

Good news. Bridgeboards are the most supported Commodore products, probably.

You are about to experience having two separate computer systems under the same hardware simultaneously, and both independently, and in a new mode, called harmony. This will be a new experience for you, although there are many variations of this and other multiple approach.

You need to run Janus software on the Amiga with all cards plugged in to the Amiga side and operating OK.

Janus does the bridgeboard bit. The hard drive almost certainly contains an image of an ancient PC that might be resurrected to full capability, which on a 386 running DOS, ain't a lot.

I hope you can cope with that barebones infomration and search Aminet for appropriate information and the local scrapyards for suiitable extra hardware to add.

At some point you will stop in this endeavour, that's cool. Janus could look forwards and backwards in time, mythology wise.

DOS Driver for that SCSI Card

Er, no. You got to have a compatible PC SCSI card that it was formatted with, sometimes. You can try with the SCSI controller you have, but PCs didn't have an equivalent to RDB at the time that was consistent across all systems. Depends when the drive was written, what with. Usually it changed with a manufacturer at least.

Even having the correct driver for what you have doesn't work sometimes, but strangely, having the right DOS driver for the partition, if the controller cards have same controller chips, can do the job. Filesystem issue with what the drive was written with. PCs had this problem. If the SCSI was done on the Amiga side, all will be well. If it was done PC side, that can be a huge issue.

Drive ST-506 possibly. Neither SCSI nor IDE.

[Pat the Cat]

3. The hard disk contains BOTH Amiga and PC systems. If I'm remembering correctly, it was possible with the Bridgeboard software to put Amiga partitions on hard drives connected to the PC side. (Can someone confirm/refute this?) They wouldn't have been bootable, but since the machine had Kickstart 1.2 anyway, that wouldn't have mattered. The system's boot floppy would have contained the the appropriate configuration files and mountlists to make this work.

You can do without Bridgeboard. Bus to bus

If you imagine multibus systems like this, and this kind of works with most Amiga SCSI gear. A SCSI controller can be connected to 7 devices, any of which can be a controller. Each controller can see the others drives as well as it's own, because they are all on one bus. The problem with doing this SCSI style is when you unplug a drive or controller, or power it down, all the systems bomb out. Bad news for CD owners who eject a drive. Guess ther are ways around this.

IIRC BB is similar bus to bus, The PC can access the Amiga drives, the Amiga can access the PC drives, I think. That's kind of the idea.

[Pat the Cat]

3. The hard disk contains BOTH Amiga and PC systems. If I'm remembering correctly, it was possible with the Bridgeboard software to put Amiga partitions on hard drives connected to the PC side. (Can someone confirm/refute this?) They wouldn't have been bootable, but since the machine had Kickstart 1.2 anyway, that wouldn't have mattered. The system's boot floppy would have contained the the appropriate configuration files and mountlists to make this work.

You can do without Bridgeboard. Bus to bus

If you imagine multibus systems like this, and this kind of works with most Amiga SCSI gear. A SCSI controller can be connected to 7 devices, any of which can be a controller. Each controller can see the others drives as well as it's own, because they are all on one bus. The problem with doing this SCSI style is when you unplug a drive or controller, or power it down, all the systems bomb out. Bad news for CD owners who eject a drive. Guess ther are ways around this.

IIRC BB is similar bus to bus, The PC can access the Amiga drives, the Amiga can access the PC drives, I think. That's kind of the idea. One way to do it is for the PC side to autoboot, but that means hooking the drive up to a controller that side that is bootable. If wll bootup as last set, which means if it doesn't have the hardware present, it will not boot up properly if at all anyway.

So reading the data on the Amiga makes as good sense as any. BB systems aren't just BB when starting them up, they are all hardware needed for that PC hard disk to startup correctly.

I did call it an archive a while back, but somebody zapped the comment already. Thanks guys. You can't verify a BB PC disk is bootable unless necessary hardware is also plugged into the right places for it to boot. You do not get autoconfigure on a 386 PC.

[Pat the Cat]

OK. You might never be able to boot off the PC disk to get the PC hard disk to get going, but you should be able to get access to the data. Very good chance of it.

One complication with the older drives - because they have multiple data cables, it is ever easier for just one end to be the wrong way around and the connections get scrambled.

You really want to power off and read a manual for the PC hard drive controller if you can. Make sure the cables are all connected correct way around, these older ones are tricky sometimes.

The reason you can usually do it from the Amiga side if you can suss out the controller is - you can usually get the PC going enough from floppy to mount the drive to DOS at least. That's one starting place.

This is not a SCSI or IDE drive, but if the drive spins at least, good chance you can pull the data from it, however it was setup to read to..

How good you can get Janus going to mount the PC hard drive from the Amiga is just a question of getting the right components, after that, should access OK. Sounds like it. One attempt if the circuitry on the drive has died is to try to find an identical circuit board, that can be swap out replaced on most types. Spinning drive healthy or savable mostly..

One very handy thing to know about working with old PCs. Digital Research DOS. It's very handy if you need a boot disk that will get you to a DOS prompt on a real PC. Works usually on emulators too, but you want about 5.31, not much later if any. DOS is DOS nearly 100% on these early PCs. You don't have to touch microsoft products to do it, but that's another way.

[Pat the Cat]

Using DJMount or other Mount with a drive of this era has one issue - you cannot automount. You must have a mountlist entry. Values to write one (they're are few lines of text) are usually written on the drive where you can read them. It is typical for this kind of hard drive not to automount.

ide or scSI drive on mount, this is old school.

Also, janus has it's own library, I assume that is present in some form where the Amiga can get it. From the original boot floppy. Or a working copy anyway, working to the point where you can get most of it into a working booting floppy. That's the AmigaBootdisk in the download, so if you combine the two somehow, that should get you some bits going at least. Copying old onto new would be best, libs, devs, c, l, any other directories. You might not need the actual startup sequence from the old one.

Old one maybe has mountlist in L to use to mount PC hard disk? Sidecar obviously where Janus lives.

[Pat the Cat]

(Facepalm) sorry I thought you had Bridgeboard software download already? If not;-

http://www.cbmfreaks.com/?p=63

You can find lumps of Janus on Aminet too, IIRC.

https://duckduckgo.com/?q=aminet+janus&t=canonical&ia=web

It can be dangerous to DL too much, it got lots of software. You want version compatible with your BB hardware.

[Pat the Cat]

OK, but another way if DJ mount isn't working is to start with a DOSbooting disk from the DL and put a DOS driver and mount command for the PC to fire up from floppy and access it.

That would confirm at least if the drive is good, bad or indifferent maybe.

One odd thing you can get with setting up bridgeboards is disk-validator virus. That might have been what took out the Amiga floppy working properly in the first place. Bridgeboard is from the era when that could be a problem. You ind of know you get it when you delete the file using hardware (ripper hardware like Action Replay)  and it keeps reappearing when you eject from the ripper. DV lives in L, you don't even need it really. The tricky bit can be making sure it doesn't keep coming back on you or crashing the system when you delete it.

The thing with Janus was, you could have drives setup anywhere mapped out anywhere. Very flexible in terms of what drives could be JH0 etc. hardware was very varied, so were names. That should be in L on the original boot floppy for the BB.

Also, DJMount might be autoconfig friendly all right, the issue is, that age of hard drive almost certainly isn't. Not all SCSI gear was either, sometimes you had to have a manual entry, typing MOUNT XYZ: from l/mountlist.pc or similar, where the second was a path to a little txt file.

[Pat the Cat]

My SUSPICION is there are config files missing on the GENERIC "Bridgeboard DISK". Drive Mappings, Mount points etc.

tThis is the case.

It is very likely these are present on your "Original Janus" Amiga disk, and you should examine the directory contents and compare it to the Download "Modern Janus" Amiga floppy. That's the Janus side. In theory, there were not many changes to to the original release and specification for compatibility. In practice, some parts changed a lot to retain compatibility with different AMIGADOS releases. But it was a big thing for CBM to keep BB compatible with all Amigas. Less so for Escom and later.

On cable connections, the best way to be SURE they are connected is to get a pin diagram for each end and check that way. Then you are sure they are connected properly and that issue is resolved, but it is critical component of any solution.

This could stop even a real PC accessing the PC hard drive, with a correct floppy disk set to mount the hard drive correctly for PC DOS use. Let alone expecting an Amiga to work properly. FDisk is a good way to check for connection on the PC side, but I am not sure it would pick it up for a drive of this age, if the drive was formatted to a weirdo Amiga compatible filesystem. It should, but the standards were different then, and there were limitations in reading or even connecting "alien" devices.

BB are a bit weird, because they have shared busses, one side can talk to the others devices even if the other is technically "crashed" or hasn't been booted to an operating system. That was the whole idea, and it's what made BB so much better (more expensive though) than an emulator. Either side could have a problem, and losing the Amiga side usually lost you bits done by that (things like keyboard input) but that didn't matter sometimes.

Another point - the HD controller card might be dead, rather than the HD itself. Might need replacing.

When / If you do get file access to the drive, your first action should be to dump the contents to a suitable directory, that can take FFS sized file names and directories, of a larger area than the drive. You only get one guaranteed shot at reading the data, if you do reach that stage, so retain it as your first and top priority.

Relying on that hard drive to keep operating is not a good plan. If the read head is misalligened and gouges the disk surface as it starts reading the data, you destroy everything as you preserve it. Seen that happen. Not a pretty sight. This is why you "PARKed" a drive before turning the system off. The heads didn't park themselves safely in most drives. SCSI and IDE usually don't have that problem much if at all and are quite happy, so long as they are not shut down midstream.

[Pat the Cat]

FYI, on an unrelated note, if you do intend to get this system running again and expanding it into a dual Amiga/PC workstation, you can also extend those last two 8-bit ISA slots into 16-bit by adding the missing connectors.  Like this:

Although if you're going to do that I'd look into getting a faster model bridgeboard, as well.  

I'd forgotten you could do that, and some Amigas, you had to. Thanks.

[Pat the Cat]

so, is replacing the Current Ancient Hard Drive.
 
 I have a pile of Hard Drives that I have from replacing most of our 7 home computers (family of 5), with SSD drives.  
 
 I'd like to use them for an AMIGA HARD DRIVE and Possibly and IBM Hard drive.
 
 What are my options for both.  Higher priority would be to have an Amiga Hard Drive.

Depends on what type of connector they have. I would reckon most if not all would have 40 pin IDE connectors. Legacy (old) A2000 HD controllers are nearly all SCSI.

Even if all the drives you have are SATA type, there are solutions, but let us know what you have before people start recommending "ideal" solutions.

[Pat the Cat]

Well, the main contenders on the left are all IDE. The laptop drives top right might be IDE or SATA. All my opinion, I haven't tried looking ever for an IDE controller for the A2000 - But - ;-

It's not going to be that easy to get an IDE controller for the A2000. Not without searching a lot of Amiga market places online. Bhudda was one such, there are others listed in the hardware databases, the snag is finding someone willing to sell. Be wary that all will fit, some are Zorro 3 and so only fit an A3000 or A4000.

A good alternative (IF you can find a seller) are the ICD A500 controllers. These work by unplugging the CPU, plugging in the board, and plugging the CPU on top. Very nice solution, but very rare now. They fit A2000s too. Not a card expansion but they do work very nicely.

Now the above 2 paragraphs could be untrue, there might be a commercial source still. I couldn't find one, but like I said, I never really tried to look for one before. Others here are way way more experienced than I am at finding Amiga equipment.

[Pat the Cat]

Good work darkage. Obviously me searching on "A2000" was not the best way.

Reason I never seriously had to search for Amiga equipment - I either fixed what I had or it stayed broken until it was fixed.

Nah, that card should work good. It is not that easy to blow up a HD controller.

Only person I know of that offers warranties with their Amiga gear is me. Haven't got IDE card. Sorry.

SATA-IDE convertors not that hard to get, but watch out - some of them you can't boot with.

Also, first partition on a hard drive has to be less than 4GB, and most people stick with 2 or less. Plenty. There are various patches out there for bigger drives, but they usually insist on later (2.1, 3.0, and upwards) Kickstart ROMs in the Amiga. Using more on different partitions works, but you are much smarter to stick with 2GB sized paritions. OS is 32 bit, remember.

[Pat the Cat]

CF is more geared towards A600/A1200 users, who have both IDE and PCMCIA built in.

A2000 has neither of those. Usually CF or SD into IDE is cheapest solution, but not in your case.

A2000 cards are NEVER the cheapest. Unfair I know. But, at least they are not as pricey as Zorro3 cards. Maybe 3 times the price?

EDIT: Tandem driver is here. Site has quite a lot of support for Amiga hardware;-

http://amiga.resource.cx/exp/tandem

And the nice part is - you can get CD-ROM attached real easy too, easier than A1200 or A600.

[Pat the Cat]

Not worth it $76. A2091 maybe worst ever SCSI controller for Amiga. Max Partition size is 256MB. Only allows one partition per drive.

[Pat the Cat]

Darkage.

So what does no autoboot mean exactly.?
The amiga will power up. I'll need to put in a Workbench disk into Floppy Drive.

Then do something to boot the Amiga off the Hard drive.

Correct?  Or something else.

Close. The floppy mounts the hard disk into the system and then you can transfer boot to that. A standard WB floppy would not have the handler (l), driver (.dev) for the hard drive. You could copy them onto a WB floppy, then adjust the startup with a MOUNT command.

It is far from ideal. I guess one thing about an A2090A - you could connect the existing hard drive to it. (shudder)... I thought you said you wanted a faster solution, so that probably is a backwards step.