Old CD-Roms and Amiga 1200

[Gavilan]

Hi: as the subject says, i have been experimenting a little bit with my 1200 and some old cd-rom players i have

I dont know why, but it seemd that certainly brands refuses to work with the Amiga ide port, am i correct?

In my examples, i tried to use a 2.5 Quantum HDD with a 24X Cyberdrive. Hooked together, machine wont start. If i just use the HDD , machine runs smoothly.
Then i tried the same cd-rom with at least 4 other of my hard disks, it didnt work with none of them (2 2.3GB WD, 1 2.2GB Maxtor and 1 Seagate 1GB)

I then tried a 4.3GB Samsung hooked together with the CD Rom. Machine works perfectly

Finally i tried all above hard disks but the 4.3 Samsung with 12X BTC cd rom , 52X Samsung CD rom and 52X Asus CD Rom.
They all worked with the HDD. I double checked jumper settings, so i have to say that Cyberdrive is VERY difficult to make it work with an HDD attached

Same happened with every CREATIVE CD ROM i tested (3 of them)

Does anybody experienced the same?

Which, in your opinion is the best IDE CD Rom drive to hook on a 1200???

Cheers

Sebastian

[Mindrax]

Hey Gavilan!
Its not the CDs that is the problem here, its the powersupply.
You need an external powersource for it.
I got myself a external case with its own powersupply and connected the cable from the Amiga out to it.
Its not fancy but it works. I got a special cable with both 2.5" and 3.5 connectors on it.

[Gavilan]

Forgot to tell you...i have a ATX PSU, adapted to the Amiga...350W, so i guess the problem relies somewhere else...

[motrucker]

The Amiga 1200 (or any model, actually) can be picky about IDE  and SCSI drives. This is true of hard drives and CD-ROM drives. My A1200 is now using a 4.3 Gb Hitachi hard drive as the boot drive, I have tried to use drives of this same make - none work. My A1200 also refuses to work with Creative CD-ROM drives. We'll have to ask David Haynie about this one. It's a problem that's been around forever.

[Boot_WB]

Yup, I've also had a problem lately with a 52x CDrom which I tried to install (can't remember the brand off the top of my head) - A1200 wouldn't boot once IDEfix had become resident, regardless of whether CDrom was sharing an IDE channel or had one to itself.
IDEfix didn't see it as a scsi device at all, just as an ATAPI device.  Don't know whether that has any relevence or not.

[alenppc]

It could be a cable length problem, the standard A1200's IDE interface is unbuffered and might have problems with long cables. Officially only a 5cm cable is supported. Increasing the length of the cable the reliability decreases proportionally, which is why additional buffered interfaces have been so popular on the A1200.

That said sometimes it is necessary to cut the first wire (the red one) on the cable which carries the reset signal since some hard drives are too slow to start, and this might help improve compatibility with some models. So far I used many different drives with the A1200 including several Creative ones, so it is most likely a cable problem.

Although sometimes certain brands of hard drives are incompatible with other brands of CD-ROMs but that's fairly rare.