Largest Capacity Hard Drive In A600?

[rkauer]

 The A600's ROMs versions are:

 37299 or less: no support for IDE (although there is a funccional IDE on the motherboard);

 37300: up to 40Mb IDE hd (I had one A600 with this exact ROM and a 2Gb hd running in it, don't ask how);

 37350: up to 2Gb hd.

 Those up are ORIGINALS. 3.0 (39106) 3.1  (40.068) are later upgrades (you buy one of those babies easily on Amigakit, Vesalia or SoftwareHut).

 3.0 recognise up to 4Gb, 3.1 the very same (other programs on ROM makes this late kickstart more usuable for today's).

 I strongly sugest you look at the "purple screen" when your Miggy is turned on with no floppy in drive. What version of kickstart is on the screen?

 If the version is 37300 or up, you can install a "new" IDE hd easily. Those "low profile" hds can be easily found on Ebay for almost nothing.

[Matt_H]

You may also be in for an unpleasant surprise when physically mounting the drive - the position of mounting holes on drives has changed since the A600 was built, meaning you'll either need to drill new holes in the mounting bracket or find an older drive.

[Chain]

rkauer wrote:

 37300: up to 40Mb IDE hd (I had one A600 with this exact ROM and a 2Gb hd running in it, don't ask how);

same here.
recently my old original hd in A600HD (30MB WD TidBit) stops, ive installed 500meg drive from powerbook (apple marked) with 2.1 workbench and everything works like with 37.350  8-)

[dbrads]

Belial6 wrote:
Are they really that hard to come by?  What are they going for when they sell.  My father seems to come by a lot of them when he is refurbishing equipment, and I was thinking that Amiga users might be a good outlet for him to sell some.  Right now he is talking recycling them for the metal.

 Yes they are, I gave up trying to find small HDs here, the smallest I could find was 40GB. I even have an old Toshiba Laptop PC that needed a new HD, it has an 8GB limit, I ended up with a shop pulling a unit from an old Laptop just to get rid of me! (and that HD is noisy already so it won't last long)

 I am sure that if you list some drives for sale on this site you will be able to shift them (don't let your father destroy them!)

[amigadave]

tridion wrote:
Thanks amigadave That was the first reply that made any sense to me.

I would only want it for old nostalgia stuff so I am sure the standard A600 will be fine. I guess a 4Gb 2.5inch drive is pretty hard to buy these days so is it true you can but any size and just partition 4Gb of it?

You are welcome and also welcome back to using Amigas and to Amiga.org, the greatest Amiga website community on the planet.

A lot of good info regarding exact Kickstart version numbers followed my message.  Here is some more info for you to add to theirs.  If you want to get the whole use of any HD larger than 4gb, buy a v3.1 Kickstart ROM chip from one of the few remaining vendors (my preference is Amigakit) and purchase AmigaOS 3.9.  This should allow you to format and use almost any 2.5" drive size you want.

Again, with the relatively small Amiga file sizes, I suggest getting the smallest, cheapest HD size you can find.

Again, good luck, welcome back and don't hesitate to ask questions on these forums.  There is a great wealth of educated talent here and 99% of them are very friendly and willing to help. :-D

[Fixer]

amigadave wrote:
If you want to get the whole use of any HD larger than 4gb, buy a v3.1 Kickstart ROM chip from one of the few remaining vendors (my preference is Amigakit) and purchase AmigaOS 3.9.  This should allow you to format and use almost any 2.5" drive size you want.

Ermm.. on a stock A600? I don't think telling him this is very helpful.

[Hodgkinson]

I've been looking for a 2.5" small HDD for a while, too. Bought one 207MB drive from a radio rally - Never worked. Bought a IBM Travelstar 4.86GB for £5 - Click of death.
I have a spare laptop drive, but its a Quantum Go Drive 42.9MB SCSI-II - So not much use.
I've also got a Toshiba laptop with a HDD, except the drive keeps on going clunk...clunk...clunk... so its probably not very well.

I'd also say save the low capacity 2.5" drives. I've got a stack of IDE ~2GB drives, except that they are all 3.5". A bit difficult to mount in A1200's or A600's.

Hodgkinson.

[AmiDude]

amigadave wrote:

Your A600 probably has the 2.04, 2.05, or 3.0 Kickstart ROM inside of it.

The A600 was never released with a 3.0 ROM.
3.0 ROMs where only made for the Amiga 1200 &
4000. However, I believe there's a A500
accelerator which was delivered with a 3.0 ROM.

[DrDekker]

I've had similar experiences with secondhand harddisks as Hodgkinson.  For what it costs, I'd buy a new over-capacity drive and just format the required 4Gb.

Take a look here - 2.5" 40Gb Seagate

For thirty quid and a five-year warranty - it's damn good value. :-D

[mike-]

Patches for Wb3.1 - 3.5 - 3.9
http://os.amigaworld.de/index.php?lang=en

You'll also need the latest sfs or ffs.
http://strohmayer.org/sfs/

You'll need to repartition and format the drives after the fs drivers are patched in.

I recommend that you make copies of your installation disks and patch them and not the originals.

I've used a 60 gb hd with my a600 myself.. Still i've only used about 800 mb or so.. The idefix97 software will also help unload the cpu a bit and add support for larger hd's. And a replacement Hdtoolbox tool might be needed. This is on aminet i think. Any data you write above 4gb on a stock install will get corrupted btw.  

As far as accelerators go, you should try mailing http://ami.ga and be put on the list for the new 68030 600 accelerator.

Good luck

[Piru]

@mike-

Any data you write above 4gb on a stock install will get corrupted btw.

Actually it's worse, it will overwrite the data below the 4GB mark, causing both to get corrupted. It's also likely that RDB is overwritten, and if this happens you lose all partitioning info.

Needless to say, if you attempt >4GB usage, doublecheck everything to make sure it works properly...

[Belial6]

Well, I just talked to my father, and he said he sent off a huge stack to be recycled already, but that he has several still around.  I'll go by his house this weekend and see what he has.  If it looks like he has something useful, I will get him to log on and post what he has here.

Just so I know what to look for, what are the kinds of drives most to least desired?  The last time I looked at hard drives for the Amiga was when I got my A500 soon after it's release.  At that time, everything was SCSI, but it seems IDE is prevalent on the... um... newer... machines.  So, if you tell me what can be used, I will try to stop some of these drives from going to salvage.

[amiga92570]

tridion wrote:
Thanks amigadave That was the first reply that made any sense to me.

I would only want it for old nostalgia stuff so I am sure the standard A600 will be fine. I guess a 4Gb 2.5inch drive is pretty hard to buy these days so is it true you can but any size and just partition 4Gb of it?

I have a 4gb hitachi drive (model DK239A-48) you can have for $10.00 plus shipping. I can take paypal or money order. I don't know where you live so I do not know if it is worth it. Pm if interested.