Installing a hard drive in A1200

[justmehant]

Hi guys, new to the forum but glad there are still other Amiga users out there. I've recently got my Amiga A1200 down from the loft at my parents house. Unfortunately the Hard drive inside seems a bit worse for wear and won't boot at all. I guess too many years sitting around doing nothing. The sad thing is, although I used my Amiga as my main computer for many many years before moving over to the PC I cannot for the life of me remember how to install the Hard Drive including formatting it etc. I have an 800mb hard disk that I am hoping to use in place of the 200mb drive which was inside, although I will attempt to re-format the current drive first just in case it can be salvaged. Can anyone direct me to an installation guide which will help me to set up the drive? This would be much appreciated.

Many thanks in advance

Andy

[SamuraiCrow]

I assume you still have the boot disks and that the new hard drive is a 2.5 inch hard drive (44-pin IDE cable).

First you load up HDToolbox and select the drive.  Don't low-level format it because it is an IDE drive and they come low-level formatted from the factory.  Partition the hard drive with whatever size you like (my personal preference is to make the partitions less than 512 megs just to speed up validating if the system crashes).  Format the partitions individually by clicking on them and selecting format from one of the menus.  (Don't use directory cache on Kickstart 3.0 because it is buggy.)  Install Workbench from the original disks using the installer.