new (old) user

[ruseone]

hi
new user here
have had an amiga since 1994, standard a500, got a 360mb hd for it and a a570 cd rom drive
in 2000 i got a 4000 25mhz which i upgraded to 17mb and a 2gb hd
i will be getting the amiga out after a few years of non-use (hope it still works) and will probably be coming here for help


i am a mac user (have loads from iie to g5 powermac)

[beller]

Welcome!!  You've found the right place to talk about all things Amiga...

Sounds like you have a nice start to the collection, now for a 1000, 2000, 600...you can never have enough it seems!

Also lots of Mac users here (myself included).  

Enjoy!

Bob

[ruseone]

thanks

i have always been amazed at the amiga and how much better they were than the other computers at the time (pc) but over the years i moved to macs and never looked back

someone at work mentioned the amiga to me today and it reminded me that i have unfinished business with the 4000, namely installing a cdrom drive (could never get it done)

i have loads of macs and no space left to store anything, so unless something like a 3000 or a 1500 comes along, 2 amigas are enough (the wife would go mad otherwise)

i may upgrade the hard drive to a 20gb soon.. just to start

[Bazzaq]

Welcome... The 4000 has plenty of upgrades about, some easy to do/get some harder to find..

first think cd-rom > very easy. ide cdrom set as slave on second connector of ide cable to harddisk, download idefix97 demo from aminet.net and install it, away you go with cd access.. Idefix is a demo but its the easiest way i found of getting a cd working under os 3.

Check your battery is not leaking on the 4000, most common fault is it leaks and kills the clock and / or the simm slots.

[ruseone]

the battery comment panicked me....

just spent 30 mins getting it out of the cupboard

turned it on, powered up but didnt boot to workbench

opened it, battery looks a little manky

fiddled around with the ide cable and it booted!!!! i am happy  :-D

have 2 mb graphics memory and 16 other... 2112mb hard drive

kickstart 39.106 and workbench 39.29 if that means anything to you guys

first thing, will any ide cable from a pc work? the one in there at the moment is a little beat up

[beller]

Before that battery gets worse, remove it or replace it ASAP!

If it looks like it's leaking, power will only make it worse.  Seriously, this battery needs to go it seems...

Bob

[Bazzaq]

Battery needs to go.. It will work without it, just wont keep time when powered off.. Depends if any has leaked onto the motherboard, the clock chip may be dead anyway.

pc ide cable will be fine.

[Daedalus]

Can't stress to remove the battery thing enough!! That'll eventually leak and eat right through your motherboard, damaging internal layers which are impossible to repair. It's possible to do some modifications to make it use a CR2032 battery (the type used in most modern machines). CD drive should be no trouble at all with IDEFix 97 as someone said, and any IDE cable will do.

After that, be careful of using hard drives bigger than your current one, as your OS version (3.0) doesn't support them. Updating the scsi.device and using a replacement filesystem such as SFS will sort that out, just ask here again if you do go that route

If you're replacing it now, you might as well get a brand new 80 or 120GB drive as these seem to be the smallest available, and are cheap as buttons.

[ruseone]

thanks guys.. battery gone

doesnt look anywhere near as bad as this

http://stuff.vandervossen.net/temporary/mobo_full5.jpg

there was only a small amount of white fuzz around the edge of the battery and on the motherboard

had a panic and pulled the battery out.. had another panic that it wouldnt work after.... just booted it and it works fine....


will give it a good clean and a new ide cable tomorrow

[DiskDoctor]

@ ruseone

Well hello.

"Mac. The last outpost before Amiga."

That's how I see it

[ruseone]

i have got the cd drive working!!! only took me 7 years of owning the 4000!!!!!

thanks for the advice about the idefix97... shame it keeps giving me a register message

i did try putting a larger hard drive in and didn't manage to get it working

i was confused at first as it didn't boot, then i remembered to change the boot options as the battery had been removed.  i tried a 4gb and 6gb hard drive as a secondary drive instead of the cd drive but couldn't get the amiga to boot

@diskdoctor...  as long as i don't have to use windows (any version ... 3.11 to 7), i don't care

[Plaz]

Hello and welcome.

You can actually still get a registered copy of that IDE software from here....
IDE Max '97   http://www.vesalia.de/e_idemax97.htm

Or you might try a trick I've done before with software that has popups..... Grab one the utilities known as a screen mode promoter. Some will let you configure so that certain screens and programs will open in a background screen instead on on your main work screen. Then the stay out of your way. Here's one... ModePro screenmode promotion

Plaz

[Plaz]

Oh and be mindful of the hard drives you use. The older AmigaOS could only address 4gig on the HD. If you try to set up partitions beyond 4gig you likely will end up over writing your earlier partitions. I think HD support is improved starting with OS3.5 and also 3.9, but you will need 3.1 roms to use 3.5 or 3.9. Many A4000's and A1200's only came with 3.0 roms.

Plaz

[stefcep2]

IMHO OS 3.9 is worth it for the large hard drive support AND the included cacheCDFS, meaning you don't need IDEFix.  However it also includes a new icon system, which looks great in 32 colors or more but will slow your machine down if you don't have graphics card, so you might want to use a diferent icon system like magic workbench