First time HD install in A4000 w/OS3.1

[Argus]

@KD7HTH

The A4000 and A1200 use scsi.device at unit 6 for the on-board ide controller.  If you install an IDE drive, HDToolbox should show the drive at unit 6.  If not, either the drive is not jumpered correctly to master (check the drive and set it to 'master' rather than 'slave' or 'cable select' or 3.0 is too buggy to recognize it.  If you're using 3.0 roms there may be some incompatability issues with newer ide atapi drives (i.e. they won't work right, or not at all).  Perhaps this is the problem.  I have a second A4000 w/ 3.0 roms and have tried to use a 1Gb slimline 3.5" ide drive but HDToolbox only will allow me to set up a small 100Mb partition on the drive (strange?).  I also attached a quad-speed ide atapi cd rom but neither HDToolbox nor AsimCDFS see it under scsi.device.  I suspect problems with the 3.0 roms, which really were tested out on the old Seagate ide drives they shipped with.  My suggestion is to play around with the jumpers on the new drive or use an older (smaller) atapi drive.  In the alternative, you can install 3.1 roms for the A4000 desktop, which should give you better results, as well as other bug fixes, rtg, and other enhancements.

[Argus]

KD7HTH wrote:
@Argus

Thanks for the info. As for 3.1 ROMS that is another issue I am having with this A4000. I installed a Kickflash OS4 that I loaded with Firmware 1.6 and 3.1 Kickstart ROMS for the A4000 on my A200HD. Well, no luck the A4000 chooses to ignore the Kickflash and boots directly to 3.0 ROMS. I followed all directions and even removed the jumper as instructed with no results. So I wasted 50 USD there and will have to burn another 60USD to get the actual ROMS.    

I too have a Kickflash but haven't used it yet..hmmm.  Anyway, I can't tell from your post exactly but afaik you can't use the A2000 Kickstart ROM images on the A4000 so maybe that is your problem there.  You might want to email Jens Schoenfeld of Individual Computers about your problem.

I see in a later post you got the first 2GB partitioned. That is in line with the 32-bit arithmetic partition limitation of Amigados 3.0/3.1. That's good news.  I don't know about your atapi cdrom though.  What are you using for a cd file system?

[Argus]

Ah yes, the money pit.  Who among us doesn't know the $$ needed to sustain the habit?

I finally got around to working with my 3.0 rom'd A4000.  I couldn't get 3.1 to recognize a 1Gb ide drive nor cdrom but 3.0 installs perfectly on the 1GB Seagate ide drive and AsimCDFS installed my 4x Mitsumi atapi drive no problem.  I think you're going to need to softkick into 3.1 from a 3.0 harddrive install.  If you have another A4000 w/ 3.1 ROMs you can copy the ROM image onto floppy for use with the softkicker program.  I've done this with A500s before but not an AA machine.  Same principles apply though, so it should work.  I would think you'd want to save your Kickflash flashrom space for the 3.9 rom update later.