hard drive change for A500+

[taononstop]

hi there,

Pretty new to the Amiga world (I was more a C64 man). I now have a 500+ with the CDROM and a A590 HDD unit. Can I change the 20Mb hard drive by any other IDE hard disk?
Can anyone point me to a doc on how to do this (preferably for an A500 beginner, but not a nitwit either).  

thank a lot!
Joris

[doctorq]

You can't put an IDE drive inthere, even though the cable looks the same. You need a XT drive or a SCSI drive. You can see more about your harddrive controller on www.amiga-hardware.com. Look under SCSI controllers, I tink you can even download the manual from here.

[taononstop]

thanks!

I will try that and let you know.

[Tahoe]

When picking up a SCSI drive save yourself a lot of trouble by buying a 50Pins drive. Don't go for 68 or 80 pins, it will require an adapter to fit your A590.
A 2GB drive SCSI 50pins should be dead cheap!

[doctorq]

Yeah, good advice given there. I actually have a 2 GB IBM SCSI drive I was planning to install in my GVP HD8+, but haven't got time for it yet :-(

When buying a 50 pin drive you reduce the number of jumpers that need to be set. I have a 80 pin IBM drive as well, and the adaptor board to get it from 80->50 pin has 8 jumper settings I think, and with scsi drives there is enough jumper settings already.

[taononstop]

doctorq wrote:
Yeah, good advice given there. I actually have a 2 GB IBM SCSI drive I was planning to install in my GVP HD8+, but haven't got time for it yet :-(

When buying a 50 pin drive you reduce the number of jumpers that need to be set. I have a 80 pin IBM drive as well, and the adaptor board to get it from 80->50 pin has 8 jumper settings I think, and with scsi drives there is enough jumper settings already.

OKAY, I will try to get one on eBay; 2Gb 50 pins. Will it be hard to set it up as a bootable disk?

[doctorq]

You don't need to go for a 2 GB drive, but just get the size you think would be enough for you. If you look at the site I described earlier, you will see that some ROMS would only see 512 MB of the harddrive, so you have to take this into consideration.

If you manage to get your A500 to boot afte putting the new harddrive in it, it should only be a matter of launching the A590 setup disk and enter HDToolBox. Here you create partitions on the harddrive, and you choose which one should be bootable.