**Need Setup HELP** with Classic Amiga 2000 HARD DISK (Bridgeboard)

[Raffaele]

(Retro Computing Device) What is it?  What's inside? (Challenge)



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Looks like something from the 90's.. reminds me of something that either SGi, Sun or Digital would bring out.....  at first I wanted to say SGI but no funky colours, logo or unique shapes.

Yes it has 1990's design and it is modular on the front just as like japanese engineers preferred design for electronics. It recalls me of Sharp X68000 but it is not Sharp X68000.

Maybe it is some graphic station for Television Titling, and GFXs like Truevision Targa, or maybe it is some mainframe for engineering CAD in automobile or aereonautics industry just as you suspected.

Can you made some close photos of the rear to check if there were engraved names of the connector ports?

Have you tried to post these photos on a Retrocomputing forum? You may have better chance of find what it is.

[Raffaele]

Raffaelle,

Oh, I wish what you say worked.  That would be perfect.
I tried the CTRL-ALT-ESC many time before.
IT DOESN'T do anything.
Maybe part of my Keyboard map problem.  But I think not since CTRL works, ESC works and ALT works.

I think that is for higher Bridgeboards 386/486 that were made with newer BIOS.  That is why I keep thinking upgrading my Rev 3.5 Bios.

I HAVE A 8086 Bridgeboard, not the 386/486.

** IF SOMEONE HAS A 8088 Bridgeboard and they try CTRL-ALT-ESC at BIOS Boot **

I went to AmigaResource.cx and I checked for Manual PDF file. Manual is common to Bridgeboard 8088 and 80286, and yes!

As you said, from some hints (Chapter 5 page 45, it is stated that 286 "has special Setup Utility".

Unfortunately so it seems that the Setup Utility is available starting from 286 Bridgeboard.

Any more idea's

From the same manual it seems that 8088 card should recognize automatically any hard drive controller xt card inserted into bus slot, so I dunno what is the problem.

I starting supposing that you must do installation with original DOS 3.3 disks provided with Janus XT Board and forget for a certain time the idea of using DOS 6.22.

Once you have setup BB and HD properly then you may think to made all updates to software.

A2088/A2286 Manual is available here:

http://amiga.resource.cx/manual/A2088-A2286.pdf

Appendix E (page 71) describes how to instal phisical Hard Drive to PC SIDE.

Somewhere in the manual I also read that installing real PC Hard Disk voids Autoboot from Autoboot PSEUDO Boot Drive into Amiga side. That could be another hint why you failed boot from autoboot virtual disk in your past tests.

It is stated in Appendis B page 58.

As long as it says to use FDISK command provided with Bridgeboard disks I think that this could be a clue to use 3.3 MSDOS Original Disks, and it stated clearly to set the partition as Active.

Maybe something changed from DOS 3.3 to 6.22 in FDisk command that may add some different sequences strings/hex-characters magic numbers in MBR to make an active partition.

[Raffaele]

So what is left is to get PC Drive exposed to Amiga Side.
That is not working.  After Running Janus, I try to do a "Format DRIVE JH0: NAME Cdisk ffs", and it says "No handler"

Because you must have reserved enough Free Space on Hard Disk when formatting PC Hard Disk. If PC Hard Disk is of 40 MB, you must format PC Side with FDisk with a maximum of 307 Cylinders to obtain 20 Meg on PC side and then use first ADISK to create Amiga Partition.

Once You made a real Amiga Partition with ADisk, you must pass to the Amiga Side and you must invoke into a CLI window the DJMOUNT command, and only at this point you can format drive with command Format Drive JH0:

Again it is stated in Appendix E (page 71 and sseg.) from  the 2088/2286 Manual.

http://amiga.resource.cx/manual/A2088-A2286.pdf

Why are all these bit and pieces are not working?  Puzzles me.
Today I looked at my original Workbench disk that use to work.
The size of JANUS.library is much smaller.  Must have been an old version (but worked).  The disk is so corrupt I can't do much except look thru filesystem.

I am not starting any more big efforts, till after the weekend.
Must stay organized and do things from start to finish in one attempt.

You have links to many original DMS files on AmigaResource.cx. You can copy these DMS, create new disks and extract the libraries and Handlers from it.

http://amiga.resource.cx/exp/a2088xt

[Raffaele]

On EAB-Abime site, at page 15 of discussion of Toni Wilen with people trying to make functioning XT-IDE Hard Disk (Virtual or not) with Bridgeboard Emluation on WinUAE.

They talk about XT-IDE Universal custom boot Rom to make hard disks being visible on  Bridgeboards...

Could it be that it will works on a solid hardware bridgeboard too?

http://eab.abime.net/showthread.php?t=76395&page=15

[Raffaele]

My RLL Hard disk is 32Mb.
Original setup was DOS(11Mb) Amiga(21).
** INteresting that is was over 20 like you say **

Now my setup is DOS(20) Amiga(12).
Maybe that is the problem.

WHY DID they make JANUS so "Quiet".
No errors, no logs, when things are not right.
"The Handler message" says not much, or why.
I guess ROM space was precious back then.  Same for Floppy space.
Time have changed.

Ok I will increase Amiga Parittion to (21Mb) like before.

Do not forget launch DJMount from Amiga side and check also if there is a JH0 Mountlist entry in your DF0: DEVS/Mountlist directory, or perhaps JDisk Device also in Devs:

Here you can find info on mountlist files:

http://wiki.amigaos.net/wiki/AmigaOS_Manual:_AmigaDOS_Additional_Amiga_Directories

You may clone another mountlist, rename it, and add the correct parameters to it.

[Raffaele]

Yes, I will run DJMOUNT.
My "Startup sequence has print statements to say what is running and what not (ie DJmount, pcdisk).

OK!

If you run ADISK before FDISK, it "Instantly says: No MBR and creates a MBR and 1 parition across whole disk.

Well starting creating just a working Amiga Partition could be a first milestone too...

[/B]If it still doesn't fix things.  I can use Ramish " part -l: " and bring back old Paritions with my files I copied in,  back

I wonder what will happen if you copy a working MBR from another PC Formatted Hard disk with same characteristics... UHM!

Is there somewhere an online collection of MBRs?

And how to replace/create a good Partition Table with correct DOSTYPE identifiers into the MBR?


[EDIT]


BTW what is maximum Hard Drive size recognized by IBM XT 8088 and DOS 6.22?


[EDIT2]


Here it is a link to a discussion of PC Users encountering and resolving problems replacing 40MB old Conner Hard Disk with Compact Flash on a 286 PC:

http://www.vcfed.org/forum/archive/index.php/t-47012.html

I hope it could be of some help.

[Raffaele]

Well going up to the root I find this is a really golden mine useful Forum:

http://www.vcfed.org/forum/archive/index.php/f-16.html

http://www.vcfed.org/forum/archive/index.php




[EDIT]

Another useful discussion:

http://www.vcfed.org/forum/archive/index.php/t-246.html

[Raffaele]

If you are using Kickstart 1.2 maybe it refuses recognizing FFS (FastFileSystem) Partition. Try just DJMount and Format without FFS parameter.

[Raffaele]

So let's try this (My favourite Program) RANISH!!

Oh my... I created another Ranish Addicted!

[Raffaele]

Useful informations:

Old Bios chips and Hard Drive sizes barriers are explained in detail here:

http://www.dewassoc.com/kbase/hard_drives/resolving_drive_barriers.htm


Volume Boot Record

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volume_boot_record


What is Partition Alignment

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Partition_alignment


And its Majesty MBR

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Master_boot_record

[Raffaele]

In my opinion you have to start again from the fundamentals...


1) Put out ALL cards out A2000 and clean connectors and cards with electric cleaning spray...

Use a lens glass and check if ALL pins of Bridgeboard are safe and no missing and do not present scratches that could interrupt connection from card side, and check also there is no sign of rust in the Amiga connector slots or on the circuits nearby...

Then re-seat all cards gently, but firmly.

(If you have a tester/meter maybe it could be interesting to check if capacitors of A2000 and Bridgeboard are still all functioning... A better test will be using oscilloscope and check them with it)

2) Download DMS files of Bridgeboard Installation floppy disks from amigaresource site and using winuae on a PC machine (or using Amiga itself) install them, extracting all Amiga and PC commands and Let's start make a control if versions you are using on your Amiga floppies do present same version, size and checksum...

Maybe you are using corrupted commands...


3)  IDE controllers are very picky on devices that are connected to it. You must set right jumpers on the hard disk to make it visible as primary master to boot. Sometimes ATA/IDE HardDisks wont boot if device has been seeting with jumpers "SLAVE" and then connected to IDE 0 that pretends finding a "Master" somewhere...

Do the CF card reader connected to IDE Adapter presents jumper settings and has been set as "slave"?

Maybe this makes it visible on 486 as if just PC considers CF a slave device.


4) In the end... Do CF card you used presents HUGE partitions that result being NOT visible by XT 8088?

I suppose you have to format CF card with all partition of maximum size consented by XT electronics and with sectors, cylinders, blocks of a size visible by MS-DOS 6.22.

BTW what is maximum size for a partition being visible with XT Computers? 128 Megabytes? 256? 512? 1024? 2046?
On the other side how big is your CF Drive? 4 GIGA? 8 GIGA? 16? That's a big difference of disk-space availability.

You must reformat your CF Drive stricly according parameters visible by XT CPU and MS-DOS limits.

[Raffaele]

I still believe Amiga Bridgeboard performs hokydoky mumbo-jumbo dirty tricks to made visible ISA slots by Amiga and by PC-XT at the same time.

You said your XT-IDE card presents same Interrupts on Bridgeboard and on 486, but 486 interrupt I suspect it is free, while on the Bridgeboard may create conflicts.

Here is a discussion on Vintage Site where they talk right how change interrupts on XT-IDE card by changing jumpers setting.


http://www.vcfed.org/forum/archive/index.php/t-19591.html


For a matter of good chance, in the same discussion they talk about Mater/Slave/Cables configuration, and again they talk also about configuring multiple 2GB partitions (on old IDE 8,4GB Drive) to make it all visible to DOS without the need of enhancing bios with external drivers or reflashing its chip.
In the end again by chance, discussion deals also with not booting CF cards.
Most versatile and usable seems to be Hitachi 6GB Microdrive capable to be set as Master or Slave.

[Raffaele]

BUT it probably won't work on RLL drive, or in Amiga.

If I intended well your situation at this point nou have virtual C: PC drive on Amiga side, resident into Amiga Floppy that boots, and your RLL Drive with no live partitions. Am I right?.

What does it happen if:

1) You re-create MBR of RLL Drive with command Format /MBR... Does it work?

So I tried many things to bring back the RLL Drive Image (without MBR), onto the SPARE Maxtor IDE Drive.

I tried Disk Edit, Ghost Editor, Recovery tools. Really close in many ways, but assembling bit-and-pieces to work impossible.

Just too complicated for my limited knowledge.

But I did get enough evidence to know how that RLL C: drive used to work.

FROM BELOW: (Diskedit of Image) you can see the following:

- C drive was bootable (Since it contains DOS, autoexec.bat, and config.sys)
- From size of command.com (it just a little over DOS 3.3, but way under 6.2)
- There was no "jdisk.com or jlink.com" that I could easily see. Which is what I expected.

** I COULD NOT OPEN ANY FILES for viewing, since the POINTERS were off, how I loaded the image
** Best I could get is moving thru directories and see what files were around

****************************************
** I got a view on the orignial C: RLL Image.
** IT was 100% a bootable drive.
** It has C:\autoexec.bat and C:\config.sys
** I still have to work to see contents of both******.
****************************************

2) What happens if you create again a new MBR on your RLL drive and then ...


2A) you copy the first two sectors of this brand new MBR into a file, on a Floppy, and then pasting its contents back on its 2 starting sectors on your Disk image?

Once you made this trick, you have a live Disk image functiong and ready to be put again on RLL Drive?


2B) What about you build again first missing 2 sectors editing it by hand?

http://www.dewassoc.com/kbase/hard_drives/boot_sector.htm

http://thestarman.pcministry.com/asm/mbr/DOS50FDB.htm

http://thestarman.pcministry.com/asm/mbr/index.html


Standard MBR Structure from MS-DOS 3.3 to Win95

http://thestarman.pcministry.com/asm/mbr/STDMBR.htm


Some Useful Tools:

http://thestarman.pcministry.com/tool/FreeTools.html

Read here:

    For TECHs, programmers and Advanced Hackers:

    PhysTechSoft Disk Editor This is a true Physical or Logical hard drive Editor. (Similar to Symantec's NORTON Disk Editor; except it won't display/guide you through Directory info. But it is designed for ANY x86 Operating System! Use it to examine NTFS, OS/2, even UNIX, etc. partitions; very small, run it from a floppy: comes with its own loader so it can boot itself without any OS on the floppy. It will run under DOS/Win95/98/maybe NT, but not under Windows 2000/XP, because they don't allow direct disk access. You can still use it to make changes to a drive that has those OSs on it though.)

    PowerQuest's Partition (and Boot Record) Info Now runs under any Windows OS !!!
    If you're a tech at heart or an Assembly programmer, then read my page on The MBR in Detail here.

A Sourceforge program that writes various kinds of MBRs:

http://ms-sys.sourceforge.net/

Undocumented MS-DOS features, Secrets and Hidden Commands

http://www.mdgx.com/secrets.htm

(This site has extensive list of Partition, Recovery, Format and Rescue Tools available for any Wintel/Linux System)

Most interesting tools that caught my attention is MBRWizard.

You can find infos about it here:

http://thestarman.pcministry.com/asm/mbr/BootToolsRefs.htm#MBRWiz

And here:

http://thestarman.pcministry.com/asm/mbr/MBRWiz.html

And on its main site:

http://www.mbrwizard.com/fixmbr.php


BIOS SPECIAL

How to dump BIOS from memory (when you find that Bridgeboard loaded it correctly)

And then save it to a binary file that could be read by an hexadecimal editor!

http://thestarman.pcministry.com/asm/bios/index.html



And in the end, regarding what we said about Xt-IDE CF cards:

Plus I like the X-IDE link you found above.

Everything they talk about makes sense to me.


I also played with Jumpers (IO addresss and Base Addresss)
** Both work proper on 486, and on 8086, except 8086 won't initialize **

But does CF card works now? Is it being seen by 486 just as like 8088?

Do you formatted CF Card with correct 2GB partition parameters before putting it into 8088 and trying booting from it?

[Raffaele]

Holly Cow!!  Our new resident Bridgeboard / Lo-Tech-ISA-IDE-CF expert!

That's the moment for a toast then! ^_^

Cheers! :cheers:

[Raffaele]

Useful Hints:


Trick to boot with MakeAB with files upto 250MB (MakeAB limit is 32MB)... Just use CrossDOS to create them.

http://www.amiga.org/forums/archive/index.php/t-60625.html


Info about the only ROM Replacement made available by Commodore to Bridgeboard 2088 (and code of the kind of of ROM Chip that must be used into EEPROMS)

http://www.amiga-stuff.com/hardware/a2088.html


I found a document where I read 2.40 (or 3.40?) Bios version Bridgeboard A2088 had some issues in initializing  cards so Commodore released new Bios version 3.66.1 that corrected these bugs.

And here there is an interesting link:

http://www.cbmfreaks.com/?p=63



EAB-ABIME thread at page 31 where they talk about Bridgeboard emulated on WinUAE. They also discussed of various issues of DJMount on a real Bridgeboard 2088 XT.

http://eab.abime.net/showthread.php?t=76395&page=31


I read also of a "notorious file" which contains all versions of ROMS of expansion cards of Amiga, including Bridgeboards:

File is called: expansion_boot_roms.zip



A word to other readers


Problems people on Amiga.org encountered with their XTIDE Board first versions 2 years ago. I wonder if they are still hanging around Amiga.org so they can read about your progress:

http://www.amiga.org/forums/archive/index.php/t-69387.html


How to Hack A2386 Boards to 486, and use SIMMS upto 16 MB of RAM.

http://www.amiga.org/forums/archive/index.php/t-34421.html


Using PC Ethernet card on Bridgeboard from Amiga side:

http://www.cbmfreaks.com/?p=63

[Raffaele]

Wondering what the Computer Box thing is that I found in my Dad's Garage.

I posted a picture on the Vintage Computer forum and someone replied.

Appears I have the NGEN computer  Graphics Modules, Hard Drive Modules, and Floppy module

(not quite the same, but very similar as shown in Link Below)
http://www.computinghistory.org.uk/det/2964/Convergent-Technologies-AWS-NGEN-Workstation/

How bad it is consumed by rust.