Dumb question regarding A3KD

[curtis]

Okay, so I picked up this A3000 desktop with 16M zip RAM.

Plugged it in and turned it on.  Floppy drive nor the hard drive work!  !@$#$^%##$!!!!

My question is, what floppy drive do I use?  880K or 1.76M?  Either?  Looks like a regular PC drive will work.  Yeah, no?

Inquiring minds want to know.

Curtis

[save2600]

If your A3K is junk, send it to me quick. I'll pay the cost of shipping and then some for your "trouble"...

[amigadave]

Curtis,  The A3000 has an onboard SCSI controller, so a PC's IDE, EIDE, or SATA hard drive will not work, unless an IDE controller on a Zorro card is added to your A3000.  Your floppy drive most likely can only access Amiga 880kb floppy disks and if you have the PC0: device driver in your Devs directory, you should also be able to read/write PC 720kb floppy disks.

[alexh]

You can use a PC 1.44MB floppy drive as a HD drive with an adapter, the trouble is that it will not physically fit in an A3000 case because of the moulded front panel.

Your only chance is to get a replacement A3000 floppy drive (either 880k or 1.76M) from an Amiga shop or off eBay or to refurbish your own unit(s) yourself.

Cheapest way to replace an A3000 hard drive is to buy a cheap SCSI card off eBay and a second hand SCSI hard drive. Narrow 50-pin drives are hard to find so you'll probably need to get an Ultra320/160 one plus an adapter). In total it should cost under £15 and you'll be able to partition, format and install AmigaOS3.9 + Boing Bag 1&2 and all your WHDLoad games and applications onto the hard drive using your PC using WinUAE at lightening fast speed and take care of things such as FileSystems and max partition sizes before you even get to your Amiga.

[jsixis]

take the top off (while unplugged) and press all the chips, cards ect.
Any Amiga floppy will work but might not look right since the 3k's have a faceplate built into them.

[smerf]

Okay, so I picked up this A3000 desktop with 16M zip RAM.

Plugged it in and turned it on.  Floppy drive nor the hard drive work!  !@$#$^%##$!!!!

My question is, what floppy drive do I use?  880K or 1.76M?  Either?  Looks like a regular PC drive will work.  Yeah, no?

Inquiring minds want to know.

Curtis

Hi,

@curtis,

Ok, on my a3000, if the floppy don't work the hard drive don't work either, the first thing to do is check the floppy drive cable. Make sure it is plugged in right, if that don't work try buying a floppy cable for a PC, some of the old amiga's cables have been fussed with so much that they are bent and broken. Your first goal is to get the floppy working, don't mess with the hard drive as of yet, disconnect it and take it out of the A3000, Take a good look at your battery for the clock. Make sure it isn't leaking. Work on one thing at a time, take any extra cards out of the expansion slots. The first goal like I said is to get it to boot, then get it to recognize the floppy drive. Then work from there.

Don't use a PC floppy, I have never had one work right in an Amiga, could be my bad luck, or it could be the Amiga uses a certain type floppy.  Look on Aminet for instructions in this area or search the webb for info.

smerf

[curtis]

WOW!!  Thanks for all the responses!

Okay, after removing the hood and re-reading the ebay auction a little closer, here's what I found.

1.  The seller stated in the auction the floppy and hard drives do not work.  He got that one right!  He said he'd been using an external floppy drive to boot.  Haven't tried that yet, but can confirm the floppy isn't even polled.

2.  Upon closer examination of the hard drive, I noticed it is NOT terminated!  There's a spot for the terminator, but nothing but holes greeted me!

Oh, the battery for the RTC has been removed.  Looking into installing a coin battery adapter for that at a later date.  I have a watch for the time!!!

Okay, not going to use a PC floppy for a replacement.  

Will a 1200 drive work for testing purposes?  I have one here for another project (don't ask...) and it's readily accessible.

For a more permanent installation, is the 3000 model specific for the floppy drive? Or can I use one for a 2000, 4000 or even a 1200/600?

Curtis
Amarillo, TX

[smerf]

Hi,

@curtis

The A1200 floppy should work, the reason that PC floppies don't work is that there are some differences in the plug pin connections on the back end of the Amiga vs the PC drives, another difference was the motor speed, the Amiga floppy runs at half the speed for some reason. Commodore knew what they were doing when they sold you a computer, they made sure you bought all parts from them or third party developers. Once in the while I try PC drives in my Amiga, the only drive that I found that worked as of date was one from an Apricot. It used a chinon drive.
Ok you do need a terminator or another scsi device that has a terminator on it, I use an old scsi Zip drive on my A3000 but yes a terminator can lock up your Amiga. \

You can use any floppy drive out of any Amiga. With PC drives you may find one out of a thousand that work. Now on a A1200 built by Amiga Technologies there was something about the floppy drive but I can't remember, any Amiga loonies out there know the story.

By the way if you are using the external scsi connector, look at it very close, the printer plug is one of the two plugs and both plugs are vertical, meaning one right on top of each other, I can't remember which plug is on top, I think it is the scsi on top and printer on the bottom. Since they both use the same kind of external plug, I can't recall how many times I blew the scsi port out by plugging a printer into it. Lucky thing there was a lot of parts available at the time and I am pretty good with electronic repair.

smerf

[curtis]

Okay, here's the progress report.

Found terminators for the hard drive and popped those in.  Checked SID and hard drive is set to 3.  Turned computer on, still get the screen asking for the boot disk.  Hard drive is spinning up, but it would appear it isn't bootable.

Borrowed floppy from a1200 that is currently a pile of parts awaiting further troubleshooting.  Plugged it in and turned on computer again.  Solid LED on floppy.  Turn off computer and switch floppy cable orientation.   Grumble for a couple of seconds.  Turn computer back on and insert floppy disk.

Computer booted!

Next step is to see if I can round up all the WB 2.04 diskettes and do a full install on the hard drive.

Also, looks like a scored an A2386SX so will be installing that after getting the basic Amiga system working.  Yeah, I know what everyone is asking, "Why the @#$^ does he want that DOS board in his Amiga?"  Well, you see I also maintain a library of vintage diskette images and would like to save a little desk space.  Of course, I'll need to figure out how and where to mount a 5.25" floppy drive.  Looks like an external drive is in order.  Time to rummage in the spare parts bin some more.

I'm also working on some BASIC programming for the TI CC-40 and plan on using the DOS side of the machine for oversized floppy storage via the parallel port and a PC Interface adapter.

Will keep y'all posted.

Curtis

[desantii]

Just FYI if you get the drive from an A2000 or A4000 you can take the shell out and use the innards in your A3000 shell, that way it will fine fine (you can even transfer the button over)

[Zac67]

..., another difference was the motor speed, the Amiga floppy runs at half the speed for some reason.

Only the HD drives run in half speed with HD disks. Paula's not able to read/write the doubled data rate required for HD, so they slowed down the disk instead. DD disks run at standard speed.

[curtis]

Well, attempted to install WB 2.04 on the hard drive.  Booted the floppy and clicked prep hd and the drive wasn't found.

Looks like I'm in need of a new hard drive as well.  Sigh...

Next update will probably be a while as I've got to find a suitable hard drive and go from there.

[curtis]

Okay, I'm going to ask and duck at the same time.

What is the max hard drive capacity for WB 2.04?  Also SCSI II?

[rkauer]

Maximum is 4Gb with original SCSI.device (from original Amiga ROM). More if you install OS3.5/3.9 or use some third-part program like IDEfix97.

 For the hardware SCSI-part it is pretty "agnostic": you can use the HD you can get. Beware to only enter the right information on the HDToolBox.

 Search for the HD information you get and just low the number of cylinders to match 4Gb barrier (or a bit less).

[curtis]

4Gb?  Cool!  For some reason I thought it was 2 Gb.