GVP Harddrive for A500 problemS!!!!

[Tenacious]

Is it the Impact Series II? How are you powering it?

I power mine, and the A500, from an old PC power supply.  I don't think the old A500 brick can power both for very long, if at all.

You should be able to upgrade the hard drive to a larger SCSI model.

Did it come with any fast ram?

[Tenacious]

Way to get me off my tired backside.  I haven't been running the system I described, so I dug it out.

When powering the GVP without an A500, the HD spins up but the HD activity light barely flickers. This happens with an unformatted 2.1 Gig Quantum Fireball.  Top switch is set to "AutoBoot".

With the GVP & A500 connected (I powered the GVP first), the activity LED flashes a few seconds and then the screen requests a boot disk.

I loaded the GVP Install disk and ran FastPrep. It let me custom-size five partitions.  I like to set up a couple 100 MB boot partitions to run different versions of the OS.  (I usually will Not allow any to be named "Work:" because many install scripts make bad assumptions about this.)

I installed OS 2.05 (couldn't find OS 2.1) with the FastPrep utility. Fast prep asks if you want to copy disks to each partition as soon as they are formatted. Upon reset, the system booted from the HD.  All is good.

Note: my HD didn't show until I formatted it with FastPrep.

[Tenacious]

Amiga.org is loading sluggishly on my end.

It seems that you've done everything correctly if you're seeing the icons for the partitions.  NDOS indicates to me that your HD may be failing or can't complete the format process.

Do you have another SCSI hard drive to try?  Did this one come with the GVP series II?

I forgot to mention, my GVP has 2 modules and 2 Megs of fast ram.  Maybe yours has 4 or 8 Megs.  Grin.

[Tenacious]

I just wrote a lengthy response and something timed out before I could submit it.  Makes me angry to have my time wasted like that!  This happens all the d_mned time!

Is there a time-out in Amiga.org?

[Tenacious]

Glad it's working!

In short, you should be able to boot from a floppy like Workbench and copy it's content to the partion from which you want to boot.

What roms do your A500(s) have.  The roms will limit your OS selection more than chip ram.  The A500+ has 2 Megs of chip ram, right?

[Tenacious]

The A500+ is the better machine, with the trap door 1 Meg memory expansion it can have 2 Megs of chip.  I think it also might have 2.04 Roms.

The A500 can have a possible 1 Meg of chip with an A501 trap door expansion.  A minor modification is required to map the A501 to chip address space.

Either machine can have newer roms installed and run upto OS 3.1 easily.  The A500+ can probably run OS2.1 now.  OS 2.1 is very compatible, usable, and has most of the features of 3.1.

Drag-n-drop might work.  I would use the copy command from a CLI.  Do you have manuals for AmigaDos and Workbench?