Booting A1200 from Zip/Jazz drive possible??

[Amiduffer]

Is it possible to boot my Ami1200 from a Iomega Zip/Jazz drive?

I'm trying to figure a way around this dead IDE interface on my 1200, and I remember a lot of years back, the guy who ran the Amiga Crossing store in Southern Maine would boot his A1200 off a Zip drive to play XCom.

So how the heck would I go about setting up a Zip disk to do that?? I really miss my ImageFX!

Amiduffer

[MarkAshley]

1. Create a boot floppy with the necessary dos drivers and mountlist to mount your Zip drive.

2. Install Workbench on a Zip disk

3. Modify your boot disk so that in the startup-sequence, the first thing it does is mount the Zip drive, then reassign C:, S:, L:, LIBS etc etc to the corresponding folders on the Zip disk.

4. Put the zip disk and boot floppies in the drives. The floppy will transfer the system folders to the Zip disk and then should boot from that.

I haven't actually tried this, but it should work. If you need help with the assigns etc, have a look at a 3.5 or 3.9 Emergency Disk as it does exactly the same thing (reassigns the system folders to folders on the CD).

HTH
Mark

--EDIT
Just for clarification, you can't boot directly from the Zip drive. The only way to do this would be to modify the kickstart ROM to include native support for Zip drives.

[Piru]

@Amiduffer
You need Phase5/DCE accelerator with bootable SCSI interface (1230-IV/1260 + SCSI Kit, BlizzPPC SCSI models at least) and SCSI Zip/Jazz drive. Then just partition/prep the zip disk just like ordinary HDD (SCSIConfig or HDToolBox). Works fine.

However, if you have bootable SCSI interface, why not use real SCSI hdd or SCSIDE then... :-)

[Amiduffer]

Well, all I have available to me is:

Blizzard 68040/50mhz without SCSI interface
SquirrelSCSI, which I'm not sure is bootable from.

Your instruction were a little difficult to follow, but I'll try them.

Amiduffer

[Homer]

But surely you can't use an IDE Zip/Jazz as you say your IDE bus is duff ? That does only leave the SCSI option unless you can find a replacement mobo :-(

[MarkAshley]

Since the IDE interface is dead and he didn't specify that he had a SCSI controller, I'm guessing that he is connecting the ZIP drive through a parallel port???

@Amiduffer
Can you confirm how your Zip drive is connected?

[countzero]

Hmm, also it seems to me possible to boot from a pcmcia ram card ? I remember seeing the pcmcia option at the early startup menu of a1200. has somebody tried this ?

[odin]

I thought PAR zip drives didn't work on the Miggy?

[Chain]

it works, u need only little/easy to dyi adapter  :crazy:

[adolescent]

countzero wrote:
Hmm, also it seems to me possible to boot from a pcmcia ram card ? I remember seeing the pcmcia option at the early startup menu of a1200. has somebody tried this ?

Yes.  It works great on my A600.

[Amiduffer]

Oh no, it's not an IDE Zip drive, it's the external model, and I haven't hooked it up yet, I got home too late last night to bother doing anything except collapse on the bed.

It's got a standard 25pin cable that came with it and a bunch of disks. Doing these kind of things makes me nervous.

For the curious, which should I hook it to? Directly to the SquirrelSCSI or to the Parallel port?


Amiduffer

[Matt_H]

First thing to do is confirm if it's a parallel port version or a SCSI version. Connecting it to the wrong port can't be good either for it, or the Amiga.

The SCSI model should have 2 25pin ports on the back. I think one says "zip" and the other has a picture of the SCSI symbol - an arrow pointing inside a square rotated about 45°

[Brian]

Only way to actually "boot from zip" and not from floppy and then onto the zip would be to implement some kind of flash into the A1200. Only one I know of is connected to the PCMCIA port so that's no good... perhaps there's a hardhack available somewhere?

[Amiduffer]

Matt_H wrote:
First thing to do is confirm if it's a parallel port version or a SCSI version. Connecting it to the wrong port can't be good either for it, or the Amiga.

The SCSI model should have 2 25pin ports on the back. I think one says "zip" and the other has a picture of the SCSI symbol - an arrow pointing inside a square rotated about 45°

I think it's a parallel (check, looking online, I can confirm it's a parallel) port version, it has the 2 25pin ports on the back, but one one of them has a printer symbol and "printer" above it, which I would assume would be to connect to the parallel port, and then to the printer. I'm surprised they would make those kinds of different systems.

Does that mean it won't work for me?

Amiduffer

[MarkAshley]

Yes it will work. You have to build an interface which connects to the parallel port in order to make it work. Go to aminet and search for ppazip to find the details. I haven't actually looked at the schematics but this is from the readme:

  The Iomega ZIP 100 drive is available with a choice of either a SCSI
  or a parallel port interface. Unfortunately the parallel version could
  not be used on an Amiga - until now!

  This project consists of both hardware and software - a small interface
  that connects to the Amiga's parallel and joystick ports, and a driver
  file which causes the ZIP drive to operate like a standard SCSI device.

Once you have built the interface and got your zip drive working, you can do what I suggested in my first post (using a boot floppy to boot from the zip disk).

Mark