Amiga 600 Hard Disk setup

[iMacMiga]

I'm having a few problems. A major long time ago (I don't expect anyone remembers we've all drunk a lot of beer or slept, or both, and/or survived christmas & new year at least twice since) I started out with Amigas with a little A600. After a bit of machination and building a custom PSU rig for it I found that the floppy drove was dead and cast it aside in favour of a 1200 with the intention of coming back to it 'sometime'.

Sometime was yesterday when I was donated a working A600 with badly yellowed casing and a pile of games (and Deluxe Paint III - wooohhooo!! ). I kinda hacked 2 machines out of one and Robert's your mother's brother it worked. Great.

Now I'd always intended to add a hard disk to it because I get sick of swapping floppies constantly just to boot Workbench. I booted the copy of Workbench 2.05 that came with it (yes on original disks - what treasure!!) and discovered it has no hard disk tools. Drat. I inserted the Amiga OS 3.1 install disk and tried HDToolbox and that seemed to work and I installed and partitioned the drive. I even, probably through more stupidity than anything else found it will boot Amiga OS 3.1 despite only having a 2.05 ROM. Interesting.

Anyway, the hard disk partitions show up on the desktop, as IHD0:NDOS and IDH1:NDOS as you'd expect them to, so it looks at least to the casual observer like that works. The problem comes when I try to format the partitions. The OS 3.1 formatter flat out won't run. The 2.05 formatter asks me to insert the disk IDH0 (normal) then warns it will erase everything (normal) then a dialog pops up that says 'Only Quick Format is allowed' then another that says 'Not enough memory'. The thing will format floppies perfectly well (although not using the 3.1 formatter) and has about 720k free CHIP RAM.

I know 1MB is an awfully small hole to run an OS in, even on an Amiga, but I refuse to believe you need a FastRAM card just to run a hard disk, did these machines not originally ship with hard disks in some guise? Granted mine is a little bit bigger than any sold with an Amiga (1.2GB split into 2x579MB partitions) but it is otherwise a perfectly standard (and working) IDE 2.5" hard disk.

Help. I'm stuck in a loop...  :pissed:

[iMacMiga]

zipper wrote:
Check how many buffers you are trying to use with those partitions, perhaps the buffers are eating too much memory.

Good thinking.

It looks like my 2.05 set is missing a disk as itdoesn't have an install disk. It's not that big a problem as I think 3.1 would work reasonably ok on it if I could get the hard disk working, I just would have to use the 2.05 format app in place of the 3.1 version which obviously doesn't like A600s (probably becuase of the old ROM, or lack of free memory or something).

I'll give that a shot, where would I check the nmumber of buffers? Maybe in HDToolbox?

[iMacMiga]

Dropping the number of buffers worked the trick. It's now formatting happily (although at 1176 cylinders each on 2 partitions it's gonna and ice-age!!).

Tragic thing is I've just realised I have all the parts necessary to build an Amiga 1200 from the spares and dregs from building my 1200T (I have a spare board, set of 3.0 ROMS, and all the casings, keyboard etc.) except a floppy drive and the only spare I have is in the A600!!

Oh by the way does anyone know which way around the A1200 ROMs go in or a page that tells you?

[iMacMiga]

Cheers matey...