I screwed up and got a A1200 on EBay...

[motorollin]

KatManDEW wrote:
If I disconnect the hard drive from the real A1200, it will boot from a floppy in an external DF1 (which also amazes me), but the CF drive doesn't show up on Workbench. If I go to the System drawer and run Format, the CF shows up as CC0: but it only it only shows up as 20k in size (it's really a gig), and I can't format it.

CC0: is not the correct way to use a compact flash card in the PCMCIA slot on an Amiga. You need to use this. That will mount a different device name which you need to use (i.e. not CC0:).

If you are seeing something on DH0:, whether it's a DOS disk or not, then it's not the Compact Flash card in the PCMCIA slot. There is probably also a hard drive inside the Amiga.

--
moto

[motorollin]

No power cable necessary. It's powered from the motherboard through the IDE cable. The extra pins are for jumpers.

Have you tried using HDToolBox to start again from scratch? Perhaps reinstalling a new RDB then creating a small partition less than 2GB in size, then try formatting it.

--
moto

[motorollin]

Yes, it's on the Workbench install floppy. I can't remember whether or not you can boot from that disk. If not, just boot from your Workbench disk then swap it for the Install disk and run HDToolBox.

--
moto

[motorollin]

KatManDEW wrote:
An 030 card is good enough?

Depends. What are you going to use it for?

KatManDEW wrote:
The 060 Blizzard isn't really necessary if I won't be doing quantum physics? :-D

Well, some games and high-end apps would benefit from an 060. But if you're not going to use them, then there's no point having much more than an 030.

KatManDEW wrote:
Which 030 card for my A1200?

You really can't go wrong with a Blizzard 1230-MKIV. Possibly the most stable accelerator for the A1200, allows lots of RAM, can be upgraded to SCSI later if you want, and is 50MHz.

--
moto

[motorollin]

KatManDEW wrote:
I did a Google search for "Amiga 4 gig limit" and stumbled onto some info stating that OS 3.1 could use the first 4 gig on drives larger than 4 gig. It said to use HDToolBox and "Get Information", and just ignore it when it shows "-128 meg" as the drive size.

Correct. The 4GB limit is a restriction on the size of the partition, not the size of the drive.

KatManDEW wrote:
Is there any way to change the icon for the CF cards? I got some icons and tried copying them to the CF card, and renaming the to "Disk.info" but it didn't change anything.

It should work. Did you reboot afterwards? You could try copyicon:

http://aminet.net/search?query=copyicon

Though I have just tried on 3.1, and just copying any icon to volume:disk.info worked after a reboot.

[EDIT]
I had AfA_OS running... when I disabled it, the icon I had copied didn't show up. So it's not enough to just copy any icon to disk.info and expect it to work. You can open the original icon in to IconEdit (in SYS:Tools), change the Type to "disk" then re-save it as volume:disk.info. Or just use CopyIcon above, which should copy the image but preserve the attributes of the original disk icon.
[/EDIT]

--
moto

[motorollin]

KatManDEW wrote:
I've already talked myself into the arm and a leg :-D  Does any place sell them new(ish)?

No. Your best bet is to get one is as good used condition as possible. I recently bought a Blizzard 1230 and it looked brand new.

KatManDEW wrote:
What's the deal with the Blizzard 603's? Are they not as compatable as the 030/040/060?

The 603 is a PPC accelerator. They also have either an 040 or an 060. If you want to run PPC software or run MorphOS on your Amiga then you need a BlizzardPPC. If all you're interested in is classic Amiga software then don't bother.

Put another way, the 603 side of a BlizzardPPC won't make your Amiga any faster unless you're actually using it by running PPC software. 68k software will still run on the 040/060.

--
moto