Help Reviving an old A2000HD

[RRunner]

Hi everyone.

I have an old A2000HD that has been sitting in my basement collecting dust for the past 7 or 8 years. The HD on it died just before I moved and it has been sitting in a corner ever since. During the move, somehow the boxes that had all of my Amiga disks in it went missing. I no longer have a SINGLE Amiga floppy disk. Ugh.

Anyways, I have two spare 2 Gb SCSI HD's that I can use to salvage the machine. It has a GVP 030 card with SCSI controller and 8 Mb ram expansion (if I remember correctly).

The hardware is in good condition I believe. If I decided to get rid of it (if it is just too much work for me to bother recovering), what would be a fair price for such a machine?

Thanks for your help!

[amigadave]

Hello RRunner and welcome to Amiga.org.

Sorry to hear that you have lost all your disks.  You might be able to find the GVP disk images on the net somewhere and download them, but then you would need some way to get them transferred to an Amiga formatted floppy disk.

Do you remember what version of Workbench you were running before the A2000 died?

I am afraid in it's current state, your A2000 is not worth much.  Probably less than what it would cost to ship it, but perhaps more since it does have an 030 accellerator in it with extra RAM.  You could try to sell it on eBay.  That is one place where you can never tell how much it will go for.  Sometimes an auction will go way up for no apparent reason and you will get lucky.  You could also separate the accelerator card and auction it separately to get more money.

Good luck!

[RRunner]

I had OS3.1 on there before it died. I think there are read errors on the drive. The machine will start to boot up and then just hang. On occasion it will boot up completely but then once I do anything that accesses the HD, it just hangs and the HD light stays on. I tried running the GVP utils on the disk before the move (and I lost the disks) but it hung using them as well. So sad. Since then I have been using WinUAE for my Amiga pleasures!

[nine3o]

Where abouts in Canada do you reside?  If you are close to the Toronto area I may be able to help you revive your A2000.

[RRunner]

@nine3o

Hey nine3o. I live in Cambridge, about 40 mins west of Toronto. I work for a company in downtown Toronto (Front Street by the CN Tower) and go into the office once every few weeks or so. Where abouts are you? Thank you very much for the offer!

[nine3o]

I'm always on the road, but the office is in Markham and I live in Richmond Hill.

I am willing to take a drive or if you like you can visit me so we can get your system working again.  Never had a GVP combo card and not sure if you need the GVP floppies to format the HD, but if all that is needed is OS disks, I am willing to help you out.  I also sent you PMail with my e-mail address if you want to get together some day.

[amigadave]

nine3o wrote:
I'm always on the road, but the office is in Markham and I live in Richmond Hill.

I am willing to take a drive or if you like you can visit me so we can get your system working again.  Never had a GVP combo card and not sure if you need the GVP floppies to format the HD, but if all that is needed is OS disks, I am willing to help you out.  I also sent you PMail with my e-mail address if you want to get together some day.

Amiga users (specially the ones here at Amiga.org) are the greatest and most helpful bunch of people on the planet!

nine3o, you may want to try to obtain some GVP utilities or install disks or disk images before you attempt the revival, as GVP SCSI controllers are a bit different (in my experience) than other controllers I have used.  I think that there should be disk images available on the web if you do a search for them.

Good luck and thanks for boosting my faith in the good Amiga users here.

[RRunner]

Thanks a bunch nine3o!

I replied to you via PM. I used to have a GVP Utilities disk that I could boot off of and it allowed me to format drives and do disk checks etc. Unfortunately that is gone now.   :-(

[AmigaPete]

Hey RRunner,
I am in Brantford. I have GVP utils discs. You are welcome to come on down and we can get that puppy up and kicking again. Send me a PM.

Pete  :-)

[motrucker]

You really don't need the GVP disks. You can prep and format the hard drive with the old standby, HDToolbox - just remember to reset the SCSI name to gvpscsi.device. You all will need the OS 3.1 disks though.
If needed, I have spare (legal) set I can send you.

[RRunner]

AmigaPete wrote:
Hey RRunner,
I am in Brantford. I have GVP utils discs. You are welcome to come on down and we can get that puppy up and kicking again. Send me a PM.

Pete  :-)

Wow. I'm overwhelmed at the offers for help!  :-)


Brantford is quite close to to where I am with respect to everyone else so far.  :-D  My schedule is pretty packed at the moment but maybe I can find some time to make a run down there in the next week or two if you don't mind some company!

[McVenco]

RRunner wrote:

Wow. I'm overwhelmed at the offers for help!  :-)

That's how we work here :-)

One more little tip: check the battery! Most of them start leaking after a while, and could possibly destroy the mainboard. Better to remove it anyway (if you haven't already done so...)

[nine3o]

I would like to give back to what the guys have given me here.  Even tho I am quite and not very active with majority of the threads.  Ever since I have joined here it reminds me of how Amiga users were from 1990 to 1993 (when I was an active user), they were always willing to help.

Guys like TheWizard (who gave me an A500 to add to my collection) and McVenco who gave me a 2.04 ROM for one of my 6 A500's that I have now, and eslapion who gave me a couple A1000's (which I never had in my collection) and A500's with expansion accessories, and many of the other users that are active in the threads and answer other users questions which I can also use.

So it's my turn to start giving back to the users on here.

[RRunner]

Encouraged by all the positive feedback and offers for help, last night I dug what is left of my A2000 system out of the basement. I found that I still have the old 1084 monitor, the A2000 with GVP 030 @40Mhz SCSI controller and ram expansion. I also have a high density floppy drive (I thought it had got lost in the move too). Yea!

I took the machine apart and used compressed air to clean everything out including the power supply. Man it was dirty. I looked around for something that looked like a battery but could not find one. I did notice a large blue capacitor on the front of the motherboard just left of the keyboard port that seemed to be leaking slightly. An area on the motherboard for about half an inch around it seemed to have an oily substance on it. I cleaned it up. Is this large blue cylinder (that looks like a capacitor to me) the battery?

After cleaning up the machine I unplugged the HD and turned it on. I immediately got the kickstart screen! Yea! According to the screen I have the 2.0 roms. I then powered down and plugged in the HD (what the heck)! Nothing. I powered off and on again and hey... I got a CLI window starting the bootup then the HD locked up. I tried again... after about the 10th time or so, I managed to completely boot up! Wow! I had forgotten but the machine was configured to use a soft kick or something to load a 3.0 rom and it has OS 3.0 on it, not 3.1 which I had assumed.

So I start messing around and everything seems fine then after about 5 mins, the HD light comes on, stays on and app accessing the HD hangs (stop watch cursor). I can switch over to any other running app however no more disk access is possible. I then power off and back on several times in order to fully boot up again. I used "diskinfo" to check the drives (DH0: through DH3:) and notice that the status of DH1: is "Validating". The HD is not spinning though.

I ran HDToolBox (or whatever it is called) and none of the drives show up! So then I ran the GVP Utils. The drives show up. I selected the option to map out bad blocks... it goes for a few minutes and then the HD light stays on and the machine just hangs.

Try number three... I used a shareware tool (some disk recovery tool I found in my utilities drawer) that has an option to validate the drive. The first try got about 1/8th of the way through scanning the drive and then it locked up. A second try got almost 1/3rd of the way through the drive before locking up.

It was now 2 am so I gave up at this point.

I am of the opinion that there is something terribly wrong with that HD. I have two other small SCSI drives kicking around and if I can find a SCSI ribbon cable with more than one plug on it, I am going to attempt to copy the contents of the existing drive over to them.

Anyone have any thoughts or ideas?

Thanks!

[terminator4]

Hey,
Toronto here also.
some tips since I had that card also.
1] remove the damn battery, if it hasnt leaked already and damaged the motherboard.  I can install a lithium for you for a small charge, or you can do that yourself.
its blue and next to keyboard connector to front.  
2] all hard disks need to be prepped with gvp 030 install disk.  have those too if you need them.
3] clean up the inside of your drive.  if you dont it will likely go bust on you.  i cannot believe how lazy people can be.  then dont do it and then whine that their stuff gets broken after 2 months of use.
4] get real 3.1 roms, os 3.9/3.1
5] your crashing is due to misconfiguration.  you must install and prep the drive properly.  anyway my offer stands I can help you get this going but ive already typed up a bit here - so hopefully others benefit from reading.
I still have some amiga hardware including graphics card so email if interested in buying it.