Just tried to use the Z3 to access the CDRom Drive. A3000 wont boot with drive plugged into Z3. I get a black screen. A3000 boots with Z3 in place but without CDRom drive plugged into it.
Couple of questions:
1. The Z3 has the terminating resistor packs in place - should these be removed? The onboard SCSI has the packs removed with them located on the SCSI drive.
2. When using HDToolbox it reports two SCSI devices. SCSI.Device and 2nd.SCSI.Device. It does not report Z3SCSI.device - should it?
Weed
1.Usually not. The convention is that the first device (controller) and last device on a scsi cable have the terminators.
2. HDToolbox has a tooltype in the icon to set which scsi.device it is working with (and so each controller). It defaults to scsi.device. On an A3000, that is the onboard scsi controller. Different kickstart version to A1200 or A4000, which obviously have IDE controllers onboard.
I suspect the Amigsa is having an issue with booting from the onboard scsi, which again is a default behaviour.
I did ask if the A3000 had real 3.1 ROMs or whether it loads up Kickstart from hard drive (original ROMs). These latter systems need care when changing the hard drive, as they need scsi boot partitions set up, They don't have the usual early startup menu (hold down both mouse buttons on booting), they give a choice of detected operating systems to boot from, and will load superkickstart disks from floppy if they can't find a suitable hard drive using the onboard scsi controller.
Bottom line is - your hard drive is almost dead if not totally dead already. Needs replacing. Might be causing an issue just by being plugged in to the onboard controller.
You can download Diskmasher images of the Z3 controller install floppies (various versions from earliest to most recent);-
http://amiga.resource.cx/exp/fastlaneEven a manual if you can be bothered to translate it. The text can be copied and pasted so this isn't so difficult.