Resurrecting an A590...

[spirantho]

Hi guys,

We've just resurrected an original A500 (and we're talking rev. 5, Kickstart 1.2 - the works. It even has a C= symbol in place of the left Amiga key) and its A590.

We got the A500 to boot - reluctantly! The boot disk was a little old, and of course no autobooting with KS1.2... The A590 is connected and whirs correctly. However, when the A500 tries to mount it the head seems to step for a while, and then stops.. we're then treated to about 20 beeps from the hard disk (sounds like a piezo buzzer).

Anyone got any clues as to what to do? We'd like to get the info off this massive 20MB if we can....

Thanks!

[Jope]

Those old WD 20MB XT-IDE disks use a stepper motor + worm screw for head movement, so the beep comes from that. (it's like a 3.5" floppy drive, but with a fixed disk :-)

Try and see if the head follows the worm, it might be that there's some gunk there that stops it from moving accurately enough.

The boot disk is for that very drive, isn't it?

Don't try to connect the XT-IDE drive to an AT-IDE controller. Bad things will happen. Also, don't try AT-IDE drives in the A590's XT bus.

The A590 is a good controller, by the way.. The SCSI side (which C= didn't use per default!) is 1.5MB/s on a 68000 if you have fast ram on board the controller. It also does DMA. Pity C= crippled 'em with those crap XT drives. :-P