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

[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.

[Pat the Cat]

When you say "whole can of worms". Do you mean I couldn't hook up a drive Larger than 4GB? Or just couldn't use more than 4GB of that larger drive? (but could still hook it up to work).

SCSI is beautiful. What Mike means is, there are different connector sizes.

Any 50 pin controller should work, any device (with some adaptors maybe, cheap). The later variants could go faster, but dropped down to Single Ended if that is what controller used, most A2000 solutions, cards, controllers in that bracket.

You will like SCSI on Amiga. Even with a Commodore card, GVP card. Maybe worst is A570 using expansion for CDTV, but they can do SCSI too.

You can only have 2GB partition sizes to be on the safe side. With the Amiga. There are ways around this, but that is "vanilla" pattern, for earlier versions anyway.

What is KickStart on the Amiga if you have not listed? That is maybe limiting fact. I will check.

[Pat the Cat]

Hey, cool fish. (Paws screen)

What you got here is a very very old A2000 that has never been upgraded. Some of this stuff is quite rare. Like the 1.2 Kickstart, you did post on first page, together with Skinny Agnus and OCS Denise.

You would have to upgrade KS to enable autobooting on ANY hard drive system? I don't know if you could ever do that on a Bridgeboard, autoboot with a PC drive from the Amiga side...

Also, to fit a ROM size of 512K is a soldering job, perhaps. You might just have to go for 2.04 or 2.1 (if you can find) otherwise, this era of A2000 is the first phase, rev 4 mobo I think.

You also don't have any fast RAM as such, you have this weird stuff like on an A500 with a trapdoor. 512K chip ram too.

These things go very cheap sometimes, but their real worth is in how undamaged and pristine they are, on the inside and outside.

[Pat the Cat]

1.3 is good for autoboot pal, nothing to worry about.

Do check the controller will do so too, some of them didn't autoboot, sometimes ROM upgrade. Usually supported though, there is ton of support for this stuff if you look. :/

[Pat the Cat]

Here is the project I need to finish. Custom Doser system for my Fish Tanks. (Ardiuno Mega). HW built/Wired(75%), SW Coding (75%).

Fish tanks are waiting for me to finish it. Once done automation will give me more time to play with the A2000.

Put a case, an SD card and encoder on it, it saves you SO much time setting them things up with Arduino dev. Otherwise it's a recompile, every setting. Write them down as you make, you can put in firmware source later.

Also be aware there can be reset issues when depending on Arduino Mega to operate continuously for weeks and months. You really have to understand power supplies and Arduino to get your head around it, but I KNOW it exists, because it played merry hell with getting in to RFID controlled doors monitored by A Megas. You have to strap extra hardware on to make it reliable. I am unsure of the exact details, but Nottingham Hackspace have some of the details on that I think. Their vending machine operates very very well continuosly - years in some cases. The mechs jam, displays get dislodged, but the Arduino is rock solid on that baby. Thank you Dominic Morrow, now THAT's a maker. The doors are pretty reliable now too.

All them folks is awesome in their own way. He builds things that are awesome. Including, you could say, Nottingham Hackspace. Their gits have some very good stuff on. They love open source. Send 'em my best wishes. No further comment.

https://github.com/NottingHack/opensource

[Pat the Cat]

Is it possible I really need some driver to load on that DOS boot to  enable the controller. Once the controller activated, the Hard Disk  might be recognized and things will be visible to PC and then thru  Bridgeboard to the AMIGA.

So it my roadblock is the fact that the HD Controller isn't activated  in DOS? (I assume it doesn't just get recognized with On board firmware  and picked up on the PC side Bus as a available Drive)

A vanilla DOS disk booting upcould not pick up a PC hard drive without the means to access it. This was put into BIOS on a real PC. On a Bridgeboard, the BIOS was fixed I think. You could not change it? Or maybe you can hack the thing, I don't know. You usually needed a device entry on config.sys at the time. Welcome to the stone age.

But I would  have thought a PC hard drive and controller of the time would have shipped with a floppy. PC or Amiga. Only later were controllers added to motherboards on real PCs.

I think the way it worked was, the Amiga side hacked off the PC side to access the PC hardware, so yes, you would need the drivers installed on the PC side.

With a DOS disk or a Bridgeboard.

Maybe just a Bridgeboard. If CBM had a generic ISA drieer that could access the controller directly, and there was a standard way to do that with that type of expansion, the PC could be just turned on and you could access it with Janus. I'm not convinced it could handle any ISA expansion, but if just HD controller type, then I guess maybe it could. Didn't really need it's own individual controller for the card as such. Genreic ISA-HD, connect, pump data.

There maybe hacks for doing some of that, and I call them hacks because it is very very naughty, technicaly. Some places, anyway.

[Pat the Cat]

I think I know why Janus isn't starting up. It was written to cover all of 5 different products with the same software. That means, you have to run PCPrefs and tell it everything properly first before a PC side hard drive can be accessed from the Amiga. That's on Page 30. It has to be told which kind of Bridgeboard is connected at least.

Further, the drive settings are complex, but there is a setting for a PC hard drive on a PC controller to be mounted automatically, if you know which kind of hard drive it is.

Do have a read, it's very good.

http://amiga.resource.cx/manual/A2088-A2286.pdf

[Pat the Cat]

OK, so you got a 486 to verify that the hard drive is showing partitions. (Hooray).

That's not helpful to getting the data off if it isn't PC data. You have to do that through the Bridgeboard via Janus.

You probably have one partition of each type, I would think. Logical, there are two partitions. Or maybe you have the BB PC HD and something else in the 486.

And you have to arrange somewhere for the data to fit, too. I'd back off the drive. Give it a rest.

[Pat the Cat]

Hang on a minute... that 5.25 inchh floppy you are booting Amiga from?

Why are you expecting it to work in PC too? I thought Amiga / PC floppies incompatible. Hack to change one into the other. That might be why does not work in 486 - is not a PC floppy drive. It's an Amiga floppy drive?

You cannot set an XT to have an HD in BIOS. FDISK will not see drive if driver not installed. Check links posted already. It's only 16K BIOS anyway.

I never knew BB shipped with GW Basic. License goes with HW, I think. If you got had 286BB and upgraded it to 486, you could have both Amiga and PC in same box. Less space. And there are drivers for controller, in DOS. You usually have to register somewhere to get them, because they are part of MS product, you see. A very ancient one. Not unrestricted free for DL, usually.

[Pat the Cat]

OK. Bridgeboard had own floppy connector, for floppy PC drive.

I thought you were booting Amiga from 5.25 connected to Amiga floppy connector. Which did not make sense if you tried same drive in PC - PC do not like floppy drives that Amiga connects with. In those days, Mac, PC, Amiga, Atari, all drives were incompatible at floppy 5.25 inch. Also 3.5 inch, I think. Everything OS could read a disk in PC format, with a little tweaking. But you could not just swap drives, and some formats were alien (Amigas could not read Mac floppies without a real Mac floppy drive without big development, do not know if ever reliable). PCs used DOS, DR DOS, others were foreign.

[Pat the Cat]

XTs need drivers for everything except basic graphics, keyboard, floppy, clock. Some will mount cards automatically from ROM on the card if the BIOS supports it, but rare with XT and 8 bit ISA gear. Wasn't a "standard" way to do that, IIRC. Stone Age, really.

The A2000 is not that dissimilar, but at least it has a 16 bit autoconfig bus. The Amiga was always nice graphics with a slow processor nailed to it, really. You had to fit more processor power, but at least you could. CPU cards came much later on the PC. ATs were nice, but they were never Amigas.

Anyway, you got all the resources out there, just consult them and think about cracking the data out, whatever it was. I'm guessing it's student stuff, which can turn out surprisingly useful later in life.

[Pat the Cat]

Well, I got some good news - apparently the drives are pretty good for keeping their contents, especially if they have been switched off and stored well. Which this one has been. So your work probably is intact on it.

Also, WD do their own DOS rescue package, called Lifeguard Tools. I don't recommend you just plunge straight in and use this, but it almost certainly contains a driver somewhere, if one is needed. Plus, it's kind of "the official rescue package" for WD products, so seems a good place to start, in terms of download everything and have a look offline. Quicker than trawling online for odds and ends. You can get the same straight from WD, if you know where to look.

http://www.4shared.com/zip/jibFxotI/Western_Digital_Data_Lifeguard.html?cau2=403tNull&ua=WINDOWS

http://support.wdc.com/downloads.aspx?DL

If you used the drive for PC files, chances are pretty much a certainty that the partitions are DOS, and you ARE going the right way about it. You might have to do a boot disk in 3.5 inch size, if you can't get your current 486 boot system happy with reading from that ISA WD controller.

If they are not, then you are going to have to learn Commodore Bridgeboard again anyway, and read them off with an Amiga. But I doubt that, it would not make sense to use a PC and store data on an Amiga. Unless you wanted to keep it REALLY safe.

[Pat the Cat]

Sounds like the 5.25 inch drive died. If none of the 10 floppies will format or read.

They can be brought back to life, if the mechanics are all ok and it's just dirt on the read heads.

It is not easy to damage a 3.5 inch drive plugging in the wrong way, but I am not so familiar with breaking or fixing 5.25 inch. It is probably easier to take the heads off for cleaning, if you can't get another one.

But, why not just boot from a floppy on the 486, from 3.5 inch PC drive, and just try it that way? Crash bang wallop, read the data off onto another hard disk, on a different controller. Job done.

A floppy disk is a floppy disk, after all. From the computer's point of view. It does not care where it boots from.

I would not boot with the whole diags tool, that sounds a bit risky unless you know what you are doing and are confident you will not damage the data. Practice a bit with it first, with the hard drive disconnected.

If you get confident with doing this sort of stuff, with IDE and SCSI too, you can earn some very nice money. Data is VALUABLE. Only now are you realizing how value it can be. Top dollar at this game is 10% (finders fee) on the value of recovered data. You got to be VERY good to charge that though. No recovery of at least 80% of data, no fee, is usual. Clients want the whole thing or they are not happy.

I usually just charge for materials, but rarely offer the service. It can be a little dangerous. You don't know WHAT is in the archive to begin with, if it isn't yours. Could be anything. Usually it's totally harmless.

[Pat the Cat]

Try

format   a:/4

http://www.easydos.com/format.html

Have to use a fresh disk. Every time you write data to an HD disk formatted to DD, it degrades.

You try can try resussitating dead High Density floppies by putting them on top of a loud speaker playing music for a few hours, or custom designed hardware to "randomize" the magnetic domains on a disk. Then try formatting them fresh again.

(This one is really deep, don't go there unless you like headaches).

http://retrotechnology.com/herbs_stuff/guzis.html

[Pat the Cat]

You could plug in a Gotek drive to a floppy port, but that's just complicating things. Amiga and PC flavours. The snag is, the data is stored as a floppy image, so you have to set them up in advance. So it just makes things 10 times harder.

If you can boot the 486 from a floppy with the controller on it, with an autoconfig file that incudes it the drive should be recognised, IF it was formatted with a PC filesystem (DOS). Any floppy. 5.25 drives sometimes have jumper to switch between DD and HD, which is a great help sometimes.

And yes, this happens a lot when trying to get data from old systems that won't boot up for some reason. First time it's a maze. ESPECIALLY with XT systems. They weren't designed for Hard disks in the first place.

[Pat the Cat]

So next step is playing with FORMAT Commands.
Windows XP doesn't have as low level on first Glance.

Will be possible now to create a DOS 6.2, or 3.2 DOS Boot Disk with a Legacy Format Command.

Yes. You pretty much HAVE to use DOS to rescue an XT system. Windows 95 onwards is not recommended for such a task. It gradually erases true DOS usage as a user choice for doing system tasks. 6 is usually OK, rarely do you have to use an earlier version (usually because the target system has very small memory, does not support the larger memory sizes so DOS 6 does not work).

Not necessarily MS-DOS, like I said, DR-DOS is an alternative. But MS-DOS is what most people use for the task. And a "real" old PC.

OR an Amiga with a Bridgecard, which can read MSDOS drives and file systems. Easier in some ways, trickier in other ways.