commodore amiga 2000

[Quixote]

;-) No model of Amiga supports a power-on password or such.  I've seen stuff on Aminet that will permit password protection, but it isn't very useful because it's so easily defeated; simply boot from floppy and remove any reference to the password tool from the startup sequence.

:-) It's not worth thousands, but it's not junk either.  with more expansion slots than other Amiga models, it has more potential for expansion.  With a X-Surf card, you could network it to other computers, and so on.  What you should add to it depends entirely on what you wish to do with it.

[Quixote]

JimS wrote:

DKB made a Zorro card that did power on password protection. At least I assume they did. Although I've seen it advertised, I never saw one myself.  Not that that would be any more difficult to defeat. Just use a screwdriver instead of a floppy.

:-o Really?  That would be so cool!  Of course, I hope the card did more than just that; it'd be quite a waste of a whole Zorro slot just for password protection.  Maybe it would be more practical to add that as a feature on an accelerator of something...

;-) Actually, now that I think of it, the A4000 did have a key switch which disabled the keyboard and (IIRC,) the mouse.  It's not the same as a password, but similar enough for most purposes.

[Quixote]

;-) If you can boot from floppy without reaching the password prompt, then it’s (probably) just a software thing added to the startup sequence.  You could remove it from the startup sequence by booting from floppy, then using an editor to edit the file DH0:s/startup-sequence (assuming the hard drive’s device name is the usual DH0:  Failing that, just use the hard drive’s volume name, which would be given under the hard drive’s icon.)

:-) The card sounds like a hard drive controller.  If it uses a forty pin connector, it’s an IDE, if it uses a fifty pin connector, it’s SCSI.  Empty chip sockets are not uncommon on add-in cards; they’re to allow for future expansions that may never have been produced.

;-) In your position, I think I’d just boot from floppy, reformat the hard drive, and then install Workbench from scratch.  

:-( Of course, I might regret it right away….

[Quixote]

Castellen wrote:

Either edit the S:Startup-Sequence to make it not run the password prog, or send me a copy of the Startup-Sequence and I'll do it for you.

:-D Or he could post it to the list and we can all chip in...

[Quixote]

;-) Okay, the red rectangle indicates the processor slot, so your card is probably an accelerator card with a built-in controller, which is almost certainly SCSI.  The card in the black rectangle and the wire soldered to one leg of the chip on the mother board looks to be a Chip RAM expansion set-up, which would give you two megabytes of Chip RAM instead of the default one megabyte.  Likely an earlier owner had this installed and sold it off separately, leaving the wire behind.

;-) And yes, the startup sequence is simply a text file called, appropriately enough, startup-sequence.  When AmigaOS starts up, it looks for a file with this name, in a directory called “s,” at the root level of whichever drive you’re booting from.