Amiga 3000D hard drive issues

[pankaujn]

I am new to Amiga.org so if I have posted this in the wrong section, please let me know.  I just got my Amiga 3000D out of storage and had the RTC battery replaced and corrosion cleaned up.  When I first powered it up, it booted to the main screen but then gave me a “read error” message.  I can no longer boot using the hard drive, but after unhooking it, I can boot the machine via the boot disk.  I would like to know how to reinstall the operating system on a new hard drive and potentially recover some of the data on the other hard drive.  Thank you. :-?

[Tron2k2]

First it might be helpful to know the OS revision of the 3000, is it 3.1?  Or still the old 2.x?  Also how big's the drive?  I'm thinking your best bet would be to plug the drive back in, then turn the machine on with the boot disk in the floppy drive.  Access the early boot menu by holding down both mouse buttons when the machine is turned on, and select the boot floppy as the bootup volume.

Once the machine boots with the floppy, you can tell which partitions of the hard drive show up on your workbench screen, and go from there.

You might want to get a copy of disksalv and run it on the disk, it will likely be able to get the problem partitions fixed/mounted enough for you to get your data off and onto another disk.  Good luck!

[pankaujn]

It is the original 2.0 that came with the machine.  It has a 68030 running at 25mhz and a Maxtor 120mb hard drive.  I tried what you recommended and got to the workbench screen, but there is no hard drive showing.  If I had not seen it boot the first time with the error message, I would have thought there was a problem with a cable.  The drive does spin up when the machine is powered on, however that is about it.  Any other suggestions?  Thank you.

[rkauer]

 Did you run hdtoolbox to partition the drive?

[pankaujn]

No, because the last time I had to machine on, the drive worked just fine, but that was the mid-1990's.  I do remember seeing an occasional drive read error message at that time.

[pankaujn]

It turned out to be multiple issues.  I switched to a different A3000 (I had two) and it boots up normally into WB2.04.  Now I'm trying to get my CD rom to work as I recently install 3.1 roms.  I have a Yamaha CRW 4416S I've tried to hook up internally on a temporary basis using the 50 pin plug off the main SCSI cable.  When I run IDE-97, it shows up as "unit 4, unknown, no SCSI inquire".  It has been many, many years since I played around with these.  Where do I go next?  I probably have some sort of termination problem, I'm guessing.

[mdivancic]

pankaujn wrote:
Where do I go next?  I probably have some sort of termination problem, I'm guessing.

I would guess you are correct. Did you use to have an external drive attached? I was putting my A4000T back together this weekend and got the SCIS drives in the  wrong order. The one with the termination was in the middle of the chain. I was getting check sum errors until I looked close and figure out what I had done. SCSI can be a pain some times.

[pankaujn]

Yes.  Way back in the early 90's I had an NEC external CD rom connected through the external port on the A3000.  Since I had an external drive and an internal cable handy, I thought I would try and get it temporarily working that way.  However I am on a new machine with a different hard drive and a fresh install of WB 2.05 which, to the best of my knowledge, didn't have any external hookups before.

[alexh]

AmigaOS2.x did not have ATAPI filesystem drivers so in order to see your CD you'll have to install a 3rd party one.

CacheCDFS
ASIMCDFS
IDEFix97
etc.

As for termination... all external SCSI CD-ROM's I've had (from back then) had two centronic style connectors on the back, one had the SCSI cable going to the Amiga and the other had a block terminator or was connected to another device which in turn had a block terminator.

I've never had to use terminators when connecting internal CD-ROM's to internal cables. Just take care not to set the device ID to that of another device OR the host controller.