a590 Harddrive Support

[Skippy]

I've got an a590 installed with a 20MB western digital HD partitioned as dh0: dh1: dh2:

The unit works fine as is, but I wanted to install a larger HD, but the unit will neither 'see' HDtoolbox or accept it, regardless of jumper settings etc.

This is an XT IDE interface.

1] Though still an IDE interface is there some reason why this unit won't support a 170MB HD.

2] There is nothing in the manual regarding HD size limitations, but are there restrictions on this unit?

Any thoughts?

Skippy

[Speelgoedmannetje]

According to me it is a SCSI interface

[odin]

Nicked from amiga-hardware.com:
The A590 is a hard drive controller which connects to the side expansion slot of the A500. It provides both a SCSI controller, and an XT controller. An XT Controller is the very old 8bit IDE standard (not to be confused with ST506). Whilst it uses the same 40pin IDE cable that modern IDE controllers use, you cannot use modern IDE drives with the XT-Controller because they are 16bit. You must use XT hard drives. These were only ever made up to about 80MB in size. There are several versions of the ROMs for the A590, Version 6 ROMs only allow hard drives up to 512MB in capacity. Version 6.6 and 7.0 ROMs have been reported to work successfully with drive sizes up to 9GB but you will need at least OS3.5 to use drives over 4GB.

So it's both an 8bit IDE and a SCSI controller, life's full of choices .

[Skippy]

Ok guys thanks for the support.

Skippy

[Jope]

Please don't connect an AT-IDE disk to the XT-IDE connector..

You might fry the drive. Besides, SCSI is wayy faster anyway on the A590 - 1.5MB/s if you have fast RAM.