installing a new HD in an A1200...

[jbuonacc]

i just noticed in the A1200 faq that it uses an IDE hard drive. i though it was scsi for some reason, so this was a bit of a surprise. a few things i'm wondering...

- my current HD is just 80mb. i have a HD in my old IBM laptop which is maybe 6.4gb. what's the largest HD that can be used? can a larger one be used, but the A1200 will only aknowledge a part of it?

- will i need a cable other than the one that's already in there?

- the only reason i think i might be able to do this is that i found a (copy of a) WorkBench 3.1 Install disk which looks like it has all the appropriate HD utilities on it. with this it looks like i should be able to back up the current HD to floppy and then re-install on the new one. sound like it would work? not sure how many floppies this might take though, probably a ton. looks like i've got two partitions - one WB partitionthat has 3029kb in use, and another one that has 27mb used up so far. i'm thinking this'd be more than 60 floppies? there may be some stuff i could delete first, but it'd take some work to figure out what.


i'd be interested in doing this, mainly because i'd like to fill the HD with audio samples which could eat up a lot of space after a while. any advice would be much appreciated. thanks.  

-justin.

[InTheSand]

Hi,

The largest drive (or at least largest part of a bigger drive) that can be used on an unpatched 3.0 or 3.1 installation is 4Gb, with a maximum partition size of 2Gb.

The internal hard drive port in a A1200 is definitely IDE, though the Amiga deals with it via "scsi.device" and the system tools see it as a SCSI drive - this may lead to confusion!

Your existing A1200's hard drive cable should be fine with a different drive.

Backing up is a pain if floppies are all you've got!!! You might be better off getting a 2.5" to 3.5" adapter, or maybe a USB to IDE adapter - and do the backing up from within WinUAE on a PC.

Alternatively, you could try networking your Amiga, or if that's not possible, at least one of the parallel port or serial port solutions to use a PC to store the Amiga's data temporarily while you're swapping drives.

Some more info on hard drive installation can be found here.

 - Ali

[Waccoon]

I bought a stock Hitachi 20GB laptop drive about a year ago, and it works just fine with the stock cable.  Any ATA laptop drive should work fine.  There are, however, a few gotchas:

1) Modern laptop drives have different mounting holes than older ones.  So, you may have to drill some new holes in the bracket.  I replaced an 85MB Maxtor, and had to drill 4 new holes.  The good news is that the new drive is MUCH slimmer than the old one, so mounting was very easy.

2) Edit:  InTheSand covers the partition sizes.

3) AmigaOS will sometimes run out of memory if you have large partitions or too many of them.  I got TONS of Gurus after putting in my new drive, and had to tweak my startup-sequence for a few hours to fix it.  Of course, my 1200 has only 4MB of fast RAM.  I can't add any more RAM with the expansion card I have since it would conflict with my Compact Flash adapter, which is what I use to make backups.

[jbuonacc]

[ahh, just noticed i put this in the wrong subforum. please move if able...]

cool, sounds like it shouldn't be too bad. i've been meaning to pick up a modem cable, so i might go that route if it's too much work to do it with floppies. i've got a bunch of disks and not much to do with them for now. we'll see how the 'cleaning' goes. i should probably just buy a different one other than use the one from my laptop though, i like my little old laptop.

i'll look around some more. thanks for the link!

[jbuonacc]

got down to about 18mb. i think i might try to back up to floppy and see how that goes. i guess i'm not in a hurry, but maybe it'd be best to do it now before i fill it up any more.

[InTheSand]

Does your Amiga have something like Directory Opus installed along with LHA? Sorry if this is teaching to suck eggs, but you'll certainly save time and floppies (and sanity!) by compressing as much stuff as possible into floppy disk-sized chunks prior to backing it up.

This also assumes you have enough space space on your old drive to temporarily hold the LHA files...

 - Ali

[jbuonacc]

i'll look into that tonight. i actually think i do have Opus 4 on a disk (maybe not all the files i need, i do think i opened it up though), and i actually have the manual for v5 to help me understand how it works a bit. this might help, thanks for the suggestion! i should have roughly 62mb free on the HD right now, i believe.