Need help with my Amiga 4000

[PhilMoore]

Greetings everyone.  I have been lurking here for a while, and I am looking for help.

A couple years ago, one of my customers gave me an Amiga 4000.   It is a 030 with 3.0 ROMS in it.  I didn’t get a keyboard, mouse, disks, monitor or anything with it.  They used it to run Scala to broadcast “news” to plant employees over closed circuit tv.  (I did get the scala book, disks, and key dongle)  I have connected my A2000 keyboard, mouse and monitor.   One of my resolutions for 2005 is to get the A4000 running.  Well, it is running, and the battery hasn’t made a mess.

Is there a way to copy the operating system directly to another hard disk?  Can I hook up an IDE slave and copy it (like windows safe-mode xcopy) or something?  I would like to do this in case the original harddrive fails, in which case, I would be left with a completely useless paperweight.

I would like to use a cd rom drive in the system.  Previously, I had to upgrade my scsi (via 060 blizzard board), and install ASIM CDFS on my A2000 to get a CD-ROM to work.  Is there an easy way to get a CD-ROM drive installed on the 4000?  I have a drive and plugged it in as Slave.  That is as far as it goes for me, however.  The boot menu shows DH0 and DH1 regardless if I have the CD-ROM plugged in or not.  

I haven’t used Amiga for several years.  I started in about 1992 with a borrowed A1000, then got my own 2000HD, which I still have.  I have several “aminet” cds and they have AGA software on them that I always wanted to explore, but couldn’t.

Are Amiga 1200 3.1 ROM chips the same as Amiga 4000 3.1 ROM chips?  

Thanks for any assistance.

Phil

[shayes1981]

Hi Phil,

Sounds like a good deal - I hope you have fun with it!

There is a way to copy the OS directly to another disk.  All you'll have to do is to install another IDE drive as a slave, and then partition with HDTools (in the Tools directory of the system drive), then format it using the menu command.  Then, select "Show all files" with the system disk open, and select everything and drag it to the other drive's window.  It's not too hard - oh, and make sure that when you partition, make the new system partition bootable.  

I'm sure that there maybe smoother ways of doing this - so if anyone has a better idea go with it!

Re: the CdRom.  You'll have to install ASIM-CDFS or some other file system.  It don't think that it will ever show up in your boot menu.  The other trick is finding a CDROM drive that will work - seems like most will, but there are definitely some that won't.

I don't think that A1200 3.1 ROMs are the same as A4000 ROMs.  I'm not sure though.

Hope this helps!

[Dr_Righteous]

Advice from a fellow A4000 owner....

A1200 ROMs are NOT compatable with A4000... The custom chipset is too different, and each ROM is written accordingly.

The IDE interface of the A4000 is not ATAPI compliant. There are drivers out there that will make a CDROM work, but I've never had satisfactory results with any of them (the best one is unregisterable, and gives you a nag screen and shuts down after about an hour). My suggestion is to use a GVP Impact Series II 2000/4000 HC+8 SCSI board (they're plentiful and cheap), fully populate the RAM on it, and use a SCSI CDROM drive (SCSI ZIP drives work nice too)... Leave the IDE channels for hard drives.

Copying the hard drive as suggested will save your programs, but will not help when it comes to the OS itself. You will definately need to obtain a copy of AmigaOS. 3.1, 3.5 and 3.9 all require 3.1 ROMs... and again, you MUST use the ones made for the A4000.

After that, you can pretty much download anything else you need off the net (with exception to anything still under copyright, of course).

Unless you've got a decent budget for a network card, I'd go ahead and get a SCSI ZIP drive to transfer files from your PC to the A4000. You'll also need to find a good stash of double density floppies, so you can turn those downloaded ADF files into disks (as high density disks just won't work with any kind of reliability, even if you tape the hole).

And of course, if it hasn't been done already, REPLACE THAT CLOCK BATTERY... Even if it looks good right now, that sucker can pop at any time and you don't EVEN want to go down that road. Play it safe, replace it NOW.

Another bit of advice... If your RAM is fully populated (ie: 16MB fast, 2MB chip), don't mess with the SIMMs. By now the plastic retainers have dried out and are brittle as hell. If somehow they do break, a fine dab of superglue at the edges will hold the SIMMs in place.

Another neat toy I've discovered is using a compact flash to IDE adapter and a 32MB+ CF card as your Workbench drive. Make sure the CF card is a highspeed one, and your boot, seek and access times will dramaticly decrease.

Well, that's about all I can think of at the moment... Enjoy your new toy!

[adolescent]

Dr_Righteous wrote:
The IDE interface of the A4000 is not ATAPI compliant. There are drivers out there that will make a CDROM work, but I've never had satisfactory results with any of them (the best one is unregisterable, and gives you a nag screen and shuts down after about an hour).

This is incorrect.  With appropriate drivers (ie. IDEFix/IDEMax, or the OS3.5+ SCSI.DEVICE) you can use ATAPI devices.  I have a DVD/CD-RW and 250MB ZIP, both ATAPI, on my A4000 IDE.  

[Dr_Righteous]

adolescent wrote:
This is incorrect.  With appropriate drivers (ie. IDEFix/IDEMax, or the OS3.5+ SCSI.DEVICE) you can use ATAPI devices.  I have a DVD/CD-RW and 250MB ZIP, both ATAPI, on my A4000 IDE.  

You're running this on the native IDE channels? Links please... I gotta see this.

[adolescent]

Dr_Righteous wrote:

You're running this on the native IDE channels? Links please... I gotta see this.

No links or pics currently.  But yes, I have both connected to the onboard IDE using the OS3.9 patched SCSI.DEVICE.  Prior to 3.9 I ran IDEFix with a different ATAPI CD-ROM.

[Effy]

Fact is that you can use a modern IDE CDrewriter on the native IDE port of the A4000 with a burn speed up to 8x !! This is what I have read earlier on this forum. But as Adolescent says, you need the IDEfix package.

PhilMoore : my advice is the following. Get yourself brandnew kickstart 3.1 roms and the OS 3.9 CD. First install a brandnew harddisc (no matter how many Gb´s) as shayes1981 explains it (just make sure your boot partition is smaller than 2 Gb) and copy your old harddrive to it. Then disconnect your old harddrive and keep it safe for emergency use. Now you have got a brandnew, for example 160 Gb, harddrive, supposed to be bootable, with one partition smaller than 2 Gb and with the OS that came with the computer when you bought it. If you set it as master then you should be able to boot from it. So far you won´t need the new kickstart nor the OS3.9 cd yet. Now you need to find somewhere the file atapi.device, somewhere on one of your floppies or from a very good friend or from the official IDEfix package. Then use AsimCDFS to locate the new 52x CDrewriter on the atapi.device and from that point you´ll know it yourself I think  :-)

Happy New Year and have fun  :lol:

[Michael_D]

Hi,

a CD-Rom at the internal IDE of an A600/A1200/A4000 will work
without problems and extra costs.
Try my help page: http://www.amiga-ide.istcool.de/ (only German, sorry)  :-o

[doctorq]

@Dr_Righteous

IDE CD drives works witout any problems on the internal IDE controller of the A4000. So far I think I have used 10 different IDE drives, all going from 4 x speed Mitsumi IDE drives to 52 x speed Memorex IDE drives. The two CD-RW drives I tried out worked as well. On my current A4000 tower I have 2 CD drives hooked up to the IDE controller, 1 as master the other as slave, I can send you a picture of it if you don't believe me.

Regarding OS3.1, then I can say that it doesn't need to have Kickstart 3.1 roms. Working fine on the Kickstart 3.0 equipped Amigas I have tried it on.

@Effy

I don't believe that the IDE controller can handle a 160 GB hdd. If the IDE interface is like the one on the A1200, then the drive size is limited to something around 142 GB IIRC.

[mgerics]

My two cents:
1: Install and partition new drive, ide or scsi, whatever works;-> make the new drive bootable and give it a boot priority higher than the current system drive. Also, make certain that the partition you will copy to is large enough to accomodate everything!
2: Go to a shell
3: Type sys:
4: Type copy clone all #? : QUIET
Where is the desigantion for the new drive (duh!) QUIET just doesn't display the copy progress,but you can leave it off if you want to.
Go get a coffee. tea, beer, etc as this will most likely take a little while.
Shouldn't be an overnighter, unless you have a *huge* drive.

If your current drive has multiple partitions, you can partition the new drive the same way, then issue the copy CLONE command at the root of each partition:
e.g.
if your current partitions are
DH0, DH1, DH2
and you have a new snazzydrive with matching partitions SNAZZ0, SNAZZ2, SNAZZ3
open the shell
1: DHx:
2: copy CLONE ALL #? SNAZZx:
Do for each partition x.

I have three bootable partitions, two of which are set with a higher boot priority; using early startup, I can select any of theothers in case I goof something up in the master. I can boot to one of them, format the master, copy the current boot drive back, and I'm done! (Special thanks to Lamar McLouth, a genius if there ever was one)

[PhilMoore]

Wow!  Thanks for the huge response!

Ok, step one:
I removed the battery.  I didn’t replace it though.  Rather than remove the motherboard and unsolder it, I carefully clipped it out following a suggestion I read on the forum.  I felt that would be less risky (and quicker) than taking the entire motherboard out.

Step two:
I found a 2gb IDE drive, set it as slave,  and booted to the original workbench.   Following mgeric’s instructions, I partitioned and formatted the drive.   HD toolbox didn’t see the drive right away,  but once I re-scanned, it found it and let me deal with it.  Then I used the COPY CLONE ALL command for the workbench and work partitions.   I disconnected the original drive, set the 2gb back to master, and I am glad to report the system is up and running on the  “new”  2 gb drive.

The original drive is a whopping 120MB –read megabytes!  So, it basically took longer to format the new partitions than it did to copy the OS.

One minor problem, is the 2gb drive takes longer to spin up, so the system is asking for the workbench disk.  I do a warm reset, and it boots up.  I seem to remember a similar problem I had with my A2000.  I had one of those Bernoulli drives, and the workbench would be up and ready before the Bernoulli drive was spun up.
I do have a scsi zip disk.  Now, I just need to get a board for the 4000 so I can hook it up.

On a side note: I found a box of about 50 ds/dd floppy disks in the basement at work.  They wanted to throw them away but I saved them.

I have been googling and looking on ebay for 3.1 roms.  Haven’t found any yet…

Thanks again for all the tips and instructions.   Next task is getting the CD rom working.  

Phil

[Dr_Righteous]

I've had that spinup problem on mine as well... I discovered that the drain on the power supply was too great due to the number of hard drives I was using (2 IDE, 1 SCSI). This turned out to be another advantage to using the CF2IDE drive, as it eliminated one of the power hungry hard drives. Hell, use microdrive cards, and eliminate hard drives all together :-D

The same thing could be accomplished by using 2.5" laptop drives, as they also have a somewhat lighter drain on powerup. SCSI hard drives, of course, are the worst offenders.

[adolescent]

Your HD spinup problem is common and will be fixed with the KS3.1 ROMS.  Glad to hear everything is working.

[mgerics]

Glad I was of assistance!

[Zac67]

PhilMoore wrote:

I have been googling and looking on ebay for 3.1 roms.  Haven’t found any yet…

Vesalia in Germany (www.vesalia.de) still has 3.1 ROMs in stock, but they're 40€ (>50$).

I picked up my A3k ROMs a bit cheaper @eBay, but haven't seen any (A3k ones) for quite a while now. 1200s are still around @~20€.