Dumb question regarding A3KD

[curtis]

Okay, so I picked up this A3000 desktop with 16M zip RAM.

Plugged it in and turned it on.  Floppy drive nor the hard drive work!  !@$#$^%##$!!!!

My question is, what floppy drive do I use?  880K or 1.76M?  Either?  Looks like a regular PC drive will work.  Yeah, no?

Inquiring minds want to know.

Curtis

[curtis]

WOW!!  Thanks for all the responses!

Okay, after removing the hood and re-reading the ebay auction a little closer, here's what I found.

1.  The seller stated in the auction the floppy and hard drives do not work.  He got that one right!  He said he'd been using an external floppy drive to boot.  Haven't tried that yet, but can confirm the floppy isn't even polled.

2.  Upon closer examination of the hard drive, I noticed it is NOT terminated!  There's a spot for the terminator, but nothing but holes greeted me!

Oh, the battery for the RTC has been removed.  Looking into installing a coin battery adapter for that at a later date.  I have a watch for the time!!!

Okay, not going to use a PC floppy for a replacement.  

Will a 1200 drive work for testing purposes?  I have one here for another project (don't ask...) and it's readily accessible.

For a more permanent installation, is the 3000 model specific for the floppy drive? Or can I use one for a 2000, 4000 or even a 1200/600?

Curtis
Amarillo, TX

[curtis]

Okay, here's the progress report.

Found terminators for the hard drive and popped those in.  Checked SID and hard drive is set to 3.  Turned computer on, still get the screen asking for the boot disk.  Hard drive is spinning up, but it would appear it isn't bootable.

Borrowed floppy from a1200 that is currently a pile of parts awaiting further troubleshooting.  Plugged it in and turned on computer again.  Solid LED on floppy.  Turn off computer and switch floppy cable orientation.   Grumble for a couple of seconds.  Turn computer back on and insert floppy disk.

Computer booted!

Next step is to see if I can round up all the WB 2.04 diskettes and do a full install on the hard drive.

Also, looks like a scored an A2386SX so will be installing that after getting the basic Amiga system working.  Yeah, I know what everyone is asking, "Why the @#$^ does he want that DOS board in his Amiga?"  Well, you see I also maintain a library of vintage diskette images and would like to save a little desk space.  Of course, I'll need to figure out how and where to mount a 5.25" floppy drive.  Looks like an external drive is in order.  Time to rummage in the spare parts bin some more.

I'm also working on some BASIC programming for the TI CC-40 and plan on using the DOS side of the machine for oversized floppy storage via the parallel port and a PC Interface adapter.

Will keep y'all posted.

Curtis

[curtis]

Well, attempted to install WB 2.04 on the hard drive.  Booted the floppy and clicked prep hd and the drive wasn't found.

Looks like I'm in need of a new hard drive as well.  Sigh...

Next update will probably be a while as I've got to find a suitable hard drive and go from there.

[curtis]

Okay, I'm going to ask and duck at the same time.

What is the max hard drive capacity for WB 2.04?  Also SCSI II?

[curtis]

4Gb?  Cool!  For some reason I thought it was 2 Gb.

[curtis]

Here's an update of my progress so far.

Got a 1G hard drive in.  Dropped it in and booted 2.04.  Hard drive perfomed flawlessly and WB 2.04 is now installed and running fine.

Got the A2386SX package in.  Board dropped into place with no problems.  However, am having a problem with the floppy side of the house.

I figured it would be easiest to use the Amiga floppies.  Configured the bridgeboard for that and when booting, the floppy drive is not recognized.  Bypass the bridgeboard cabling and the floppy comes back.

Suggestions?

[curtis]

Interesting idea, but I need a slower DOS machine for another project and desk space is at a premium!

In any other case than trying to have an ISA Ethernet board inside the Amiga, sack the bridgeboard out and never shuff it inside the Amiga again.

[curtis]

Got a DOS floppy running tonight.

Configured a portion of my hard drive for DOS and loaded 5.0 with no problems.

Now to start stuffing the software I need on it and go from there.

Oh yeah, and getting the keyboard and mouse adapters!

[curtis]

Here we go with another question.

I've pulled the motherboard to replace the battery (removed) with a coin type battery and noticed some empty DIP sockets at front right labeled U850D-U857D and fromt left labeled
U267-U274.

What are they?  I've got a full compliment of zip RAM installed, so are the dip sockets for an alternate expansion?  Can I use both?  If so, what size chips?

Thanks,

Curtis

[curtis]

Oh, I almost forgot.

Would I accomplish anything by using an external floppy controller on the Amiga side?

[curtis]

Got a full rack of zip RAM, so guess those sockets are just extra.

The DIP RAM sockets near the ZIP chips are usable when your ZIP sockets are empty (or partially filled?) to use DIP chips for fastram, if you've got 16mb of ZIP you can't use them.

[curtis]

Hmmm, that may be an expansion I'll need to look into!

The DIP sockets on the left side (U267-274) extend your chip RAM to 2 Megs. You'll need 256Kx4 (e.g. 514256) chips as found on old ISA VGA cards and such.