Need help with my Amiga 4000

[PhilMoore]

Greetings everyone.  I have been lurking here for a while, and I am looking for help.

A couple years ago, one of my customers gave me an Amiga 4000.   It is a 030 with 3.0 ROMS in it.  I didn’t get a keyboard, mouse, disks, monitor or anything with it.  They used it to run Scala to broadcast “news” to plant employees over closed circuit tv.  (I did get the scala book, disks, and key dongle)  I have connected my A2000 keyboard, mouse and monitor.   One of my resolutions for 2005 is to get the A4000 running.  Well, it is running, and the battery hasn’t made a mess.

Is there a way to copy the operating system directly to another hard disk?  Can I hook up an IDE slave and copy it (like windows safe-mode xcopy) or something?  I would like to do this in case the original harddrive fails, in which case, I would be left with a completely useless paperweight.

I would like to use a cd rom drive in the system.  Previously, I had to upgrade my scsi (via 060 blizzard board), and install ASIM CDFS on my A2000 to get a CD-ROM to work.  Is there an easy way to get a CD-ROM drive installed on the 4000?  I have a drive and plugged it in as Slave.  That is as far as it goes for me, however.  The boot menu shows DH0 and DH1 regardless if I have the CD-ROM plugged in or not.  

I haven’t used Amiga for several years.  I started in about 1992 with a borrowed A1000, then got my own 2000HD, which I still have.  I have several “aminet” cds and they have AGA software on them that I always wanted to explore, but couldn’t.

Are Amiga 1200 3.1 ROM chips the same as Amiga 4000 3.1 ROM chips?  

Thanks for any assistance.

Phil

[PhilMoore]

Wow!  Thanks for the huge response!

Ok, step one:
I removed the battery.  I didn’t replace it though.  Rather than remove the motherboard and unsolder it, I carefully clipped it out following a suggestion I read on the forum.  I felt that would be less risky (and quicker) than taking the entire motherboard out.

Step two:
I found a 2gb IDE drive, set it as slave,  and booted to the original workbench.   Following mgeric’s instructions, I partitioned and formatted the drive.   HD toolbox didn’t see the drive right away,  but once I re-scanned, it found it and let me deal with it.  Then I used the COPY CLONE ALL command for the workbench and work partitions.   I disconnected the original drive, set the 2gb back to master, and I am glad to report the system is up and running on the  “new”  2 gb drive.

The original drive is a whopping 120MB –read megabytes!  So, it basically took longer to format the new partitions than it did to copy the OS.

One minor problem, is the 2gb drive takes longer to spin up, so the system is asking for the workbench disk.  I do a warm reset, and it boots up.  I seem to remember a similar problem I had with my A2000.  I had one of those Bernoulli drives, and the workbench would be up and ready before the Bernoulli drive was spun up.
I do have a scsi zip disk.  Now, I just need to get a board for the 4000 so I can hook it up.

On a side note: I found a box of about 50 ds/dd floppy disks in the basement at work.  They wanted to throw them away but I saved them.

I have been googling and looking on ebay for 3.1 roms.  Haven’t found any yet…

Thanks again for all the tips and instructions.   Next task is getting the CD rom working.  

Phil

[PhilMoore]

Well, it has been 3 evenings and I still don't have a working CD rom.

I went digging through my junk and found a GVP SCSI +8 board with 6 megs on it.  I plugged it in, and connected a SCSI cdrom I robbed from a windows pc.  

The system loads scsidev.device with the board in there.   I have ASIM CDFS that I bought years ago, so I tried to use it.  The program, called SCSI Detect, would lock up when I would "scan" the scsidev.device.  

Now the BAD news.  After dinking around, if I install any board in any slot in the system, I get no video.  I can see the harddrive light blinking normally, like it does when the system is booting up.  I just have no display.  If I remove the card from the slot, it boots up normally.  I don't know what I did, but something is not right anymore.  I also tried a "Trump" scsi card with the same results.   The system appears to boot with no video.  I disconnected the SCSI CDROM drive power, just in case it was drawing down the power supply or something crazy.  Still no good.  I also checked to make sure the vertical "daughter ?" board with the slots on it is firmly seated.  It all looks ok...

Kinda bummin' here.
 :-(