Amiga 3000 Hard Disk Setup

[bjjones37]

I purchased an 18G SCSI Hard disk to put in my Amiga 3000.  It has the Kickstart 1.4 so I am booting a couple different Kickstart off the current Hard Drive.  It seems that there is a 4G restriction on the hard drive size unless the OS is patched. There will be just a 30M partition for the OS and the rest will be sorted into multiple 4G partitions for the remainder of the drive.

Which patch would be most suitable for this?

I have already found out the hard way that the standard OS drivers simply will not work.

[bjjones37]

You need to get the lastest SCSI.device on your system.  Install BB4 and you will be all set.  Or you could track down the latest device and patch it.

BB4 with the newer HD tools will be your best experience.  Would recommend that you use PFS from aminet.  Be sure to set the masks and max transfers correctly.  All the partitions should be the same mask and max transfers.

One Last detail, if you own the WDC 04 SCSI chip, it is known to be buggy.  Replace it with th 08 version or the AMD equivalent.  They are widely available and cheap.

I am currently running WB2.04 and planning to install WB3.1.  My system is using SoftKickstart 40.55.

Will BB4 support this?

[bjjones37]

To get to BoingBag 4, you need KS 3.1 ROMs and an install of OS 3.9 + BB 1 & 2; I don't know if you need BB3 to add BB4 or not.

OS 3.9's FFS is 45.16 which does large drives. PFS & SFS are faster, but not really recoverable, so make frequent backups of important partitions to some of the extra partitions on your 18G HDD. FFS is pretty resilient and recoverable, plus reasonably fast with enough buffers.

Mech is the A3000 OS install guru, so drop him a line if you want definitive help.

I finally got WB31 installed.  It refused to work as an upgrade to WB21 so I had to wipe it and start fresh.  There is a problem with installing PFS3.  I found it on Aminet and downloaded it, extracted to a work directory in the hard drive, but it fails to install.  I tried copying to the root of the ramdisk but it still will not install.

I think it has to be on a CD but I do not know how to extract to my XP box and burn a disk without destroying the long filenames for Amiga.

[bjjones37]

Okay, Magic ISO Maker can do RockRidge CDFS formats.  So I can make Amiga CDs now.  But PFS3 still won't install. Have to mess with it some more. It appears to be missing a file PFS3ds

[bjjones37]

I will try to install PFS3 from Aminet later today/tomorrow.  I'm fairly certain you don't need to create a CD. You may need to update you installer.

If you use PFS3 you will not not need 3.x and the latest BBs, PFS3 get's around the 4 gig limits just fine without the new scsi.device.

I would at some point look at the SCSI chip to see if it a 04 or 08.  The WDC 04 are know to be problematic and I would bet with a newer drive you will want to get the latest version.

The last item is that you have an older rev 3000 and I assume you have the rom tower, I would make sure that if you order 3.1 roms where they should be mounted.  I have never seen a 3k with a rom tower so I don't have first hand experience there.

I do have the WDC 04.  My A3000 is a desktop unit.  I did get PFS3 to install by using expert mode and selecting the 030 cpu.  PFS3v53 is missing a file so the novice install will not work. It is present in PFS3v51 but I could not get the update patch to work.  So I get the product installed.  I created a 4G partition but the PFSformat command could not see the partition.  I patched the FFS to 43.20 and it allowed PFS3 to see the partition but when I formatted, it wiped my 2G partition.  

When I set up a partition on the A3000, should I be using TD64 or DS?

[bjjones37]

And if you want to boot 1.3 from the SuperKickstart ROMs, that partition must be named WB_1.3:

Actually I have a 30M partition for WB13 (WB_1.3) and another 30M partition for WB31 (WB_2.x). I had a 2G partition for apps but it is now inaccessible.