2.5" HDD for A600

[amiga_noob]

Hi all

Can I adapt a leptop HDD for my A600.
I tried connecting it but the HDD wont power up.
Do I have to adapt the cable?

The HDD works and the A600 IDE controler work because I have tried a 3.5" HDD.

Please can anyone help.

Thanks

[Eco]

I have an old 512mb 2,5" laptop drive on my A600, it works great. A couple of things come to mind..

1. Verify the orientation of the cable on the motherboard connector.

2. Verify the orientation of the cable on the HDD connector. My HDD had some extra pins for jumpers, and I could actually plug the cable in wrong using these pins..

3. Could power be a problem? Is it a new drive which draws a lot of power? I don't know how much the A600 can output to the HDD.

4. Any jumpering to take care of on the drive?

5. The kickstart version of your A600 might be important for actually using the drive. I think anything earlier than 37.300 does not have support for the internal IDE, and support for drives larger than 40mb was supposed to come with 37.350.

Good luck  :-)

[spirantho]

I had this problem... but I fixed it in the most unusual way which you probably wouldn't want to do.

I broke my A600.

I didn't mean to! It now takes an hour (literally! I timed it) to boot up from cold - the CAPS lock light just stays on. Once it's up, it'll reboot happily, but it takes that long to come up the first time. However, for some bizarre reason it also boots up perfectly off its disk, which I'm sure it never used to do. I broke it by sticking 1MB SIMMS in the trapdoor slot in place of 256KB SIMMS - not sure why it damaged it but there we go.

What I used to have to do was make a bootdisk which ran HDToolbox, probed the bus (which told the HDD to spin up) and then rebooted, and it was fine from then on. For some reason, though, I always needed to probe the IDE bus before the disk would spin up.

Maybe that'll help you - who knows?

[adolescent]

Most modern 2.5" IDE HDs should work.  Make sure you plug the cable in correctly, as plugging a 44pin cable in backwards will fry the drive and/or the controller.  I toasted a buffered IDE interface and a 8GB HD that way.  

In my A600 I have a IBM Travelstar 2GB.  But, before that I had a Connor 40MB and I've tested a Fujitsu 1GB.  Never had a problem with any of them.

[amiga_noob]

Hi
Funny you should mention about it taking a long time to boot.
Mine took about 20-30 mins to boot up, the caps light stayed on aswell.
But I got a new mobo now.

But I put a 3.5" hdd but it only worked if the IDE cable was connected the wrong way round. It worked fine like that.
But now I have a new mobo I would like to use a 2.5" HDD.

I connect it the correct way round and the computer boots up but the HDD don't spin up.
I'll try what adolescent suggested with the boot disk.

Cheers for all the info.