Back to the Future, need help to preserve unique Amiga

[amigakid]

I agree with Amiduffer.  Get a CD Burner, back up the thing and then go from there.  If he cant remember much about Amigas telling him about the Mediators and stuff is just more confusing and a bit of a hassle, not to mention for cost effectiveness the CD Burner is cheaper and probably easily available.

[Amiduffer]

Oh yes! Pictures of your setup would be pretty nifty.

madsjm wrote:
Wouldn't it be easiest to just unplug the Amiga's harddrive and mount it in WinUAE? It's a no-brainer.
Fiddling with drivers, filesystems etc on the Amiga side is far more time consuming, especially for someone who's been on the dark side for so many years.

Nah. Keep it simple. I'd work within the system he has currently, since it seems to be rather a unique setup. Plus, its better to muck around in the guts of WB and hardware to get back into the swing of how it works.

[Mallette]

Okies, I am parsing this and wondering if the premium edition of Amiga Forever might do the job.  Tell me if this would work:

Pull the SimStation HDD
Boot to UAE
Use Amiga Forever to image the SimStation HDD to PC HDD.
Store the original drive
Put a fresh IDE HDD on the PC
Use HD Toolbox to prepare
Restore the image to it
Reinsert in SimStation
Have some fun...

I will see if I can dig up my pix of SimStation when I get home this evening and post tomorrow.  It was (is) a pretty impressive accomplishment.  

Dave

[Amiduffer]

Question, do you have OS3.1, 3.5 or 3.9 with you? If you do, simply take the SIMharddrive out of the 4000, put the new one in, format it with a fresh install of the Workbench, make the SIMhd a slave, install it in the 4000, and just copy all the files to the new harddrive.

Keep it simple and you'll have less trouble.

Although Amiga Forever is cool, if you want to take your amiga anywhere if you've got a laptop.

[leirbag28]

@Amiduffer

Well Said!   thats exactly the easiest and cheapest and bestest way.


Format a different hardrive like he said, then just copy all the files across

[cgutjahr]

@Mallette:

Tell me if this would work:

Pull the SimStation HDD
Boot to UAE
...

Yes, it would. But you need to make sure that your PC is running Windows XP/Vista (perhaps Windows 2000 aswell, not sure), older versions of Windows will overwrite important parts of your AmigaHD's content and thus make it unreadable.

Forget about using a CD burner with the Amiga - the A4000's standard IDE driver can't handle ATAPI devices (i.e. CD drives/burners). There are of course solutions for that problem, but they require installing a patch.

[mrbill]

I'm in Houston, and can help when you get around to working on this if needed.  Best way to reach me is mrbill@gmail.com.

[Mallette]

Lots of good stuff coming my way via this fine forum, but the best so far is Mr. Bill.  Expect email soon, sir.

I searched my nearly 2 terabytes of files last night and couldn't come up with my pix.  My time was limited and I'll either come up with them or make some more when we dig into this baby.  You will love it.  Marvelous piece of engineering never yet equaled in the peecee world, IMOH.  Unfortunately, I did not fully understand what Herr Gates meant when he told us "I will change the way America computes..."  

Now, to hijack my own thread, I'd like to ask you guys what is REALLY going on.  My brief survey of the remnants of the Amiga culture are rather confusing.  On one side, it appears to have dried to a mere puddle with only the turtles, gators, and other diehard left.  OTOH, Amiga, Inc. in late news seems to be poised to launch new hardware (how many times have I heard that since '96?).  They also appear to be messing in their own bed with lawsuits.  Then, MorphOS appears to be a partisan group at odds with the orthodox Amiga crowd, but with a solution that, at least on the surface, appears good and also would appear to advance the technology.

The above might be an analogy of the Middle East.  

So, my friends, of what pursuasion are you?

Dave
mrbill wrote:
I'm in Houston, and can help when you get around to working on this if needed.  Best way to reach me is mrbill@gmail.com.[/quote]

[Mallette]

Alrighty, then.  I've an offer from Bill to work on this, and an offer on an ethernet card if the work goes well and I can put it her to work.  

I'll post some pix and other info on SimStation when I can dig them up.

Thanks to all for your support!  This is a great community.

Dave

[Amiduffer]

Hi Mallette. Good luck on your Amiga/Lazarus project.

As far as the fate of our hardware? Better left unsaid. Too many stepped on toes, burn-outs, and bruised egos.

Short story, string of dead companies that touched the hardware, and today, scammers "owning" the name but doing nothing. A couple of people like Jens actually producing some hardware to keep the old hardware going somewhat.

Just do a search of old topics and you'll read the painfull discussions. It's a sad story though.

[mrbill]

Myself, I'm getting "back into" Amiga hardware and software because, frankly, nothing else beats it.  I had an A1000 as my primary computer system from 1990 to 1993, and never found anything that I couldn't do with it.

Unfortunately I had to switch to a PC clone because of college work, but always missed the Amiga.  I finally decided to do something about it after reading "On The Edge:  The Rise and Fall of Commodore" about six months ago, and have since lucked into picking up a couple of "big box" Amigas fairly cheaply.  

I'm in the process of resurrecting those systems and upgrading them to run OS3.9, and getting familiar with All Things Amiga that have happened since my days of running 2.04 on a soft-kicked A1000 and dual floppy drives.  I can emulate pretty much any system config I want with WinUAE or EUAE on my 20" Intel-based iMac, but it's NOT THE SAME as sitting in front of actual hardware (that I could never have afforded as a high school student in a small town).

After the Amiga trademarks/rights have been passed around so much, I'll be surprised to actually see the recently-announced Amiga hardware actually be available for purchase.  So much has been promised in the past ten years, and so much NOT delivered.  In addition to that, I have to look at things and think "$500 for a PowerPC Amiga, or $0 for super-fast emulation on my existing Mac?"  Hard to justify the purchase when you expect this incarnation of Amiga Inc. to go under in a year or two.

It is amazing to see the amount of software and hardware still currently produced and available for "Classic" Amigas, and the wealth of reference information available on the Web for hardware made almost twenty years ago, although the prices commanded for things like ethernet and RTG cards amaze me (and keep me from having a network-connected Amiga, as I can't afford an ethernet card).

All in all, I'm having a great time.

[Mallette]

Amiduffer:
I'll probably pass on a complete sob story.  I went through a bit of it in the first few years before dropping out and turning off.  I think it's been long enough for me to take what I can in the spirit of "use it for what it does best" and leave out false hopes.

I know I've given up hope on the personal computers promise for my lifetime.  Freedom from the iron boot of Microsoft is out of reach...but it will come.  

Nobody took the original Mac "1984" ad seriously, including me.  Very prescient.  Of course, the Mac turned out no better.  It could be, but Microsoft only suffers their existence to prove they are not a monopoly.  Apple knows if they did anything REALLY good they'd get squashed.

Morgan, Vanderbilt, Rockefeller, and the rest were complete amateurs compared to Gates.  His monopoly is far more complete than any of theirs ever were, and he has gotten away with it.  

It's the only thing I really credit him for.  

Dave

[Karlos]

Mallette wrote:

....

Job one, however, is preservation.  I need to back up the over 15 year old system drive first thing and have lost all my Amiga skills and references.

A4000 preservation rule #1: Check the motherboard battery!

It's a nasty time bomb waiting to ooze corrosive fluids all over the delicate innards of your piece of computing history.

Remove it totally and replace it with a rechargeable lithium cell. There are several people here who have done this and submitted images of the modification to the gallery.

[guru-666]

@mrbill
" Myself, I'm getting "back into" Amiga hardware and software because, frankly, nothing else beats it."

How's is life under that rock?

@Mallette
"freedom from the iron boot of Microsoft is out of reach...but it will come."

what you never heard of linux? or any of the other OS's that would exactly what you need? Better wait for that new amiga.

[Mallette]

guru-666 wrote:
@mrbill
" Myself, I'm getting "back into" Amiga hardware and software because, frankly, nothing else beats it."

How's is life under that rock?

"freedom from the iron boot of Microsoft is out of reach...but it will come."

what you never heard of linux? or any of the other OS's that would exactly what you need? Better wait for that new amiga.

As to "How's life under that rock?"...it's not enough to object without offering an alternative.

As to Linux, my CanDo Amiga programmers were running it by 1996.  I still have hopes it will get somewhere, but I've seen nothing there yet that I need.  No drivers for my high end soundcards that I use to build location recorders, no DPaint for animations, just not much for me.  

Dave

[guru-666]

linux has already gotten some where.  Im a 3d animator working on feature films with linux all day long. LOTs has happend since 96.  a lot more than on the amiga side.  Dpaint was nice now I use shake.. I don't know what you need to do, but im sure shake (apple) can do it.  It would not even be hard to program something simple like dpaint for lunux...could make it even better for your use. Amiga is dead, it was pretty good back in the day but thank god things have evolved.  Do your self a favor and download unbuntu.  then you will see you don't need mircosoft.