A1200 Hard drive location in case prob

[watchtower]

I have of recent picked up a A1200 very cheaply at a boot sale (£5) with other bits - see post in welcome announcements. It's been some years (10?) since I used an Amiga so was rusty on what was what. I turned the machine on and it booted fine - showing that a 200 mb scsi drive was in the machine. The keyboard although physicaly fine did not seem to work.
SO - opened the case and rumaged inside. The keyboard connector had come away from the M/B, the H/D was floating against it and had pulled it out. Question is: Is the hard drive supposed to sit over the M/B or further away, like in the gap near the 'escape hatch'?

The lead on the H/D as is will not reach the 'escape hatch' so the H/D must have been sitting on the M/B in this machine.(possibly easing the keyboard connector from its slot over the years - wonder if that was the reason the guy sold it, thinking it was a dead keyboard)?

Thanks in advance or any help

[Linchpin]

The HDD should be in a "cage", its a metal bracket that sits over the motherboard, provided its a standard laptop style HDD not a PC sized one...

Is that what you mean?>

[watchtower]

It's a PC size drive - did the guy just squeeze it in?? There is no cage. I thought the case was 'bulging' a bit - LOL

[JaXanim]

The first hard drive I ever had was an IBM 256Mb 3.5" (standard size) PC model fitted into my A1200 by Trilogic in Bradford.

These 3.5" dives will not sit in a standard Amiga hd carrier, which is designed for the smaller 2.25" laptop ones.

At the time, 250Mb drives were as big as they came and cost around a quid a megabyte. Anyway, the drive was cobbled into the case by cutting part of the sheet metal screening away. I admit to being a little shocked to see this when I eventually opened up the case. Trilogic had authority to break the guarrantee seal on the case and to attach new ones.

The drive was located in place by four of those double-sided sticky pads. All pretty rudimentary considering I paid them £250, eh?

I believe you shouldn't attempt to use a longer cable on the standard Amiga IDE interface, which has 44 pins. The short 44 to 40 stack adapter should be attached to a standard 40 wire IDE ribbon about 3" long.

The 'scsi' drive in your A1200 is actually an IDE drive. All drives in Amigas are referred to as scsi, but that's just a quirk of the Amiga system.

Cheers,

JaX

[Matt_H]

If you don't want to track down a 2.5" drive and cable, you can remount a 3.5" in a 1200 desktop very easily with a 2.5"->3.5" kit or cable - it just needs to be a rather thin drive. It'll fit very nicely on top of the metal shielding and beneath the keyboard ribbon. Just make sure you've got something insulating the drive from the metal! I use a small piece of foam in mine.

[Linchpin]

And some people mount them outside the A1200 case... but thats not advisory.

[watchtower]

Thanks for the input. Couple of questions if I use a new thin IDE the samsung 20GB comes to mind as it's cheap! what size will I be able to make a partition and what prog to use?

Is there a PC prog I can use to format and partition in my PC before fitting to the A1200?

(please don't fry me - I have multiple copies of this game (legal) Mind you! the guy left a copy of elite with a fantastic commander on the drive at a level I would never have the patience, skill or social inneptitude to reach.

What can I use to transfer files from the installed drive to another? Thanks

[Akira]

Just make sure you've got something insulating the drive from the metal! I use a small piece of foam in mine.

Careful, foam can bring heat issues! I suggest you put below some of those rubber feet in the HD's corners instead, so ai can flow beneath. When I bought my 1200 the HD was "insulated" with a bit of antistatic plastic, I removed that thing and put the rubber feet on it, and it is much better.

Am I the only one not having that blasted metal shield? I hate it.

Regarding the formatting of the HD in a PC, if you have Win XP or 2000, you can connect the drive to yoru PC and use WinUAE, it suports Amiga drives in its latest versions. keep in ind a 20GB HD is a bit of an overkill (at least IMO, if your amiga is not going to be your 'main' computer), and you will need something like SFS installed (or OS 3.5)/3.9 in it otherwise you're in for trouble.

[Holley]

With Workbench 3.0 or 3.1 you can only use the first 4.5Gb of a large harddisk, it will let you try to use more (but end up in a mess if you do).  Going to OS3.5/3.9 or using a different file system is a bit of overkill when you're just starting out ;-)

In general older drives won't get as hot as new ones, and it's easy to pick up a 2nd hand 2.5" harddisk cheap on ebay if you don't want to bodge it into place.

Over the years Amiga 1200s have been hacked up and bodged in every way imaginable, it's surprising what they'll do with a little ingenuity!

[Dan]

LinchpiN wrote:
And some people mount them outside the A1200 case... but thats not advisory.

Why?
I had a 2GB and a Cd-rom running with a 2,5->3,5 cable for four years before I got the IDEfix adapter. The HD was in one of those swapable HDcassete thingys for 5,25"-bays.
Of course I had replaced my psu to one of those with both amiga-power connector and pc-drive connectors.

[watchtower]

Thanks for all the advice: So will any (1-3 GB) IDE 2.5" harddisk work in the machine if I use Winuae to partition it?

[JonoPike]

Akira wrote:

Am I the only one not having that blasted metal shield? I hate it.

No, you're not. The metal shield is not for any use at all.

[watchtower]

I found that by budging the H/D up against the back of the case on top of some rubber washers and taping down the keyboard cable I could screw the case back up with no bulging. Booted up and all fine and dandy. Think I might just see how it goes. Want this as a retro game machine mainly.

[JaXanim]

@watchtower

Unless you've no option, go for something other than the 20Gb Samsung. I bought one about four months ago(because they're cheap, as you say)and it's just died completely. No warnings, no noises, nothing. Now, I can't get my Amiga/PowerFlyer to see it wherever I put it. So, all my months of effort is gone. I'll never buy a Samsung ever again.

I'm told Maxtor are the best of the budget priced drives. I just bought a 40Gb one for £35 incl postage. I have all my latest Workbench stuff on a backup Zip, but I'm beginning to wonder if every hard drive should have a similar one holding everything in backup. Is that what we should do?

Cheers,

JaX

[Daedalus]

Yup, I'd have to agree there, avoid Samsung like the plague for hard drives. They're generally fine for things like CD-Rom drives, memory etc., but I've had one die on me, plus several other peoples die when I was working at repairing the machines in Maplin. Maxtor are pretty good price/performance wise, and if it's not gonna be getting heavy use (and it's not), you should be fine. I've a Maxtor 80GB in mine that's on about 12-16 hours a day, but doesn't get heavy access, and it's fine 18 months later.
For backing up, I've a lot of stuff on mine, so what I do is use a 2nd hard drive (a 40GB IBM), and periodically copy everything across.
A thin drive shouldn't be too much hassle to fit in the 1200 case. It's been done for years and years, but again, if you don't fancy the hassle, find someone upgrading a laptop HD and throw them an offer for their old HD, or have a scour of EBay...