Just got my Amiga 4000-D down from the loft..

[sjrsaj]

Hi All,
 
I was a big Amiga fan in the 90's, but decided to see what was lurking in my loft recently (having young kids leave me little time these days to tinker!).  I've cleaned up my Amiga 4000/EC 030, it's in good working order apart from it not booting to the AmigaOS. I believe the original hard drive's haven't lasted . I played some demo's/games and everything else seems fine.
 
I have a spare hard drive, so I plan on using that, just need to find the original AmigaOS disks in the loft!  Does anyone have an easy way of getting the AmigaOS installed, I'm a bit behind the times with what the Amiga 4000 can do now. Just wish I had invested in a network card all those years ago!
 
Just for retro sake, here's a few pictures I took, and yes it does have a DPS Personal Animation Recorder inside it! (PAL)

[alexh]

If the battery has not been removed already check it out, barrel batteries leak over time slowly destroying the motherboard and surrounding components.

You can still buy network cards for A4000. Tad expensive at £75 though, but a fraction of the price they were in the old days.

Easiest way to install AmigaOS is to use WinUAE and put the hard drive (or compact flash card) in the PC. That way you can install OS3.1, upgrade to OS3.9, install all Boing Bag patches, install any tools & games (like WHDload) in a very short space of time (with backups of your disks in ADF format found on the internet ).

I would recommend that you get an IDE->CF back panel adapter anyway to make it easier to transfer files from the PC to the Amiga without a network card. They are dirt cheap, about £3 for the adapter and another £5 for a 2GB CF card.

http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=280390982691

http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=220475172797

[sjrsaj]

Thanks for the information, I'll look at plugging the hard drive into my PC and installing it via WinUAE.  If I can't find the original Amiga workbench disks, where's the best place to get them? cheers

[cv643d]

You will be surprised to see that network cards have gone down in price a lot in comparison back with what they cost back in 1997, 230 euro (Ariadne 1) versus about 100 euro for a new one now or about 50 euro for second hand Amiga NIC if you look in the right places!

You can probably find a set on the net if you search a bit, but I suggest making some connections and perhaps someone can help you out.

[sjrsaj]

I've plugged in a 6GB IDE drive into my PC, and installed WinUAE on to my computer. I found this guide http://wiki.classicamiga.com/How_to_install_SFS_onto_a_real_Harddrive_within_WinUAE
 
Is there an easier way of formatting and setting up
Workbench to then transfer the hard drive on to the Amiga 4000?
 
Cheers
 
EDIT: yay managed to get the 6GB drive formatted (2GB BOOT) and Workbench 3.1 installed and booting fine now
 
Is it worth upgrading to Workbench 3.9 ? (I'm running Kickstart 3.0 rom)

[marcfrick2112]

sjrsaj: First congrats on getting your 4000 going again! As for 3.9, I can say that it makes using hard drives bigger than 4GB easier.... you do know about the dreaded 4GB barrier, right? Without patches, once you have data on the HDD that crosses the ~4GB barrier... poof goes that data... a bit over-simplified, maybe.   Others here can be more specific....

I personally have bought 3.9, and even 3.5  But mainly to support Amiga development .... sigh....
 IMO, it's not an earth-shattering upgrade aside from the big HD support....

[Karlos]

There are some tangible benefits to 3.9 over 3.0. Aside from various bug fixes, it has a slightly improved Workbench, with ARexx port (which I found very handy), asynchronous file rename/copy/delete (never did understand why that wasn't always the case), tarted up icons, better scrolling of windows and so on. You get VinceEd as an alternative shell, which is rather better than the standard shell (though I always had a soft spot for KingCON). It also comes with a TCP/IP stack out of the box (though AmiTCP 4 is better IMO) and you also get support for larger disks, which is handy these days, since finding < 4GB drives outside of a computing museum is somewhat tricky.

You'll have to add the cost of kickstart 3.1 to that though.

[sjrsaj]

Well I created a 2GB partition for the BOOT partition, and the rest of the hard drive (about 4GB) isn't partitioned yet, so that shouldn't cause problems?
 
If I upgrade now to Workbench 3.9, will it be easy to format the rest of the hard drive as a 4GB data partition.
 
Thanks, and learning again

[Karlos]

Shouldn't be any problem. I have 3.5 and 3.9 installations using all the available space on 10 and 20GB drives.

The only proviso is that your boot partition is in the lower 4GB, since until the OS has loaded the necessary drivers, you still have an OS3.1 view of the hard disk.

Incidentally, I'm never sure why people make their Workbench partitions so large. Really, you can fully install OS3.9 in less than 30MB, including a few essential utilities. I tend to keep my OS partitions fairly small and have all additional programs, data etc on different partitions.

I also tend to set up more than one boot partition, both for testing stuff with different versions of the OS and just in case I manage to corrupt one.

[B00tDisk]

Get yourself some CF to IDE adapters and put a pair of 4gb flash drives on the PAR

[rockape]

Hi,

To refresh your memory

see http://www.wonkity.com/~wblock/a4000hard/main.html

Theres lots of A4K info there.

Kind Regards, Michael

aka rockape

[DyLucke]

My boot partition is 1gb.
Enough for having all the soft needed, and enough fast to handle in case something happens.

I do have several partitions after that one 500mb (for backup) one 2gb for Mac, one 3,5 as storage drive. And then two huge SFS ones for ordinary use.

However, Karlos, i needed to patch my OS 3.5 after installation (including boingbag 1 and 2) to have my 40gb hdd recognised properly and all the space available.

Are you sure that feature is not only for OS3.9?

I hope we will seee that 4000 working 100% soon!!!

[alexh]

If I upgrade now to Workbench 3.9, will it be easy to format the rest of the hard drive as a 4GB data partition.

If you install IDEFix you'll be able to access the rest of the hard drive as a 4GB data partition too.

http://aminet.net/package/disk/misc/IDEfix97

If you need to remove the nag screen you can buy it from http://www.Vesalia.de (or google for a personal key )