A2000 video and network expansion

[JimS]

It's looking like my Amiga doesn't like the SCSI drive I was trying to use; I left it trying to partition for 24 hours and it never got past 0%. I have various old IDE drives lying around; I'd love to use one of those, but I'm having trouble finding an IDE adapter for the Amiga 2000 at either AmigaKit or Vesalia. Google also isn't helping. Or am I barking up the wrong tree, and I should just stick with SCSI?

Most older Amigas will have problems with a 9GB drive. Depending on the controller card, the firmware may not even deal with drives bigger than 1GB. You might have to hunt around for new ROMS for the controller card.. assuming it was upgraded.  In any case, the OS won't deal with it either without some patches or workarounds, there's a 2GB limit on the OS itself. It's old, eh ;-)

[JimS]

That is very helpful to know. Somebody is selling this on ebay, but I'd much rather go IDE if I can. The Ebay drive is a 4GB drive; are you saying that it won't work either? Do you know of any IDE cards for this machine? I haven't been able to find one.

Thanks!

Unless your 2091 has version 7 ROMS, that 4GB drive won't work either. I had a couple of 2GB drives salvaged from a Sun box that wouldn't work either. I couldn't even get them to work partitioned as 1GB drives. The 500MB drive from a mac external drive worked great.

IDE cards have been made... I don't see any still available either, at least on a quick search.

[JimS]

This is not entirely factual. An older rev rom a2091 can use 4gb drives from what iirc.

Nope, that's wrong. I've actually tried it. Here's the Commodore Tech Topics page announcing the update.

[JimS]

Guess that means that previous versions before 7.0 for A2091 do not..

That's how I read it. ;-)

[JimS]

Thanx for the doc!  Is there more?

welcome....

Not on this topic.... I looked through the issues I have, and the only thing about A2091 ROMS was the 6.1 upgrade - a memory overwrite bug, and 6.6 for "reslection" on multiple drives. These things were sent out to dealers for the service department... they're on the web somewhere, I forgot where I found them.

[JimS]

So it manages > 1GByte. But does that mean it will manage 2 TByte? (32-bit LBA)

No idea.... are there any 2TB SCSI drives that would interface to the A2091? And if there were, why would anyone want one on a classic Amiga? (Except for maybe a Flyer.) I never even filled up the 500MB drive glommed from the old external mac drive.

[JimS]

That Commodore Tech Topics thing looks really cool.  Would love to see the archive if you're able to dig up a link!  

Go here: http://www.bombjack.org/commodore/commodore/ and scroll down to almost the bottom of the list. He's got them as PDFs rather than the individual page jpegs that I use.
-Jim