Hard drive in A2000 - Whats best option ?

dougal

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AmiBayer
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So... My hard drive setup in the A2000 until yesterday was:

SupraDrive Wordsync SCSI zorro card with Sony/Apple 40MB Scsi HD

and

Tandem IDE controller zorro card (no-autoboot) with WD 20gb HD & CD-Writer

The SCSI HD died (It was on its way out for ages) and replacing it seems to be harder and more expensive than I would have hoped for.

So.... 50pin SCSI hard drives are rare and expensive to buy and ship. 68pin seems a little easier to find and slightly cheaper and I have a 68pin>50pin adapter. Are there any type of 50/68pin SCSI drives that won't work ?

Is there any way to make the Tandem IDE controller boot Workbench WITHOUT needing a floppy disk ? If I do need a floppy disk what do I need to do to make it boot and will I need the boot disk every time I reset or just on a cold boot ?
 
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I have a few SCSI drives with 50 pin/68 pin and LVD connectors. 2 of the 50 pin are Seagate SCSI 3 drives and only work if you have a external active terminator plugged in the last device, I can't speak for the 68 pin drives as I haven't tried them yet. The 80 pin LVD drives are hit and miss, I have a 9.1Gb Maxtor that works fine in my external enclosure with a 50 pin to LVD adaptor and I have a 18Gb IBM LVD drive that wont even recognize, also a 9Gb LVD Seagate that works almost but spits out sync errors on large transfers.
You can find 50 pin drives at reasonable prices if you persevere with searches. Forget ebay though, rip off merchants expect an arm and a leg for them. (n)
 
Get a "A500 (1000, 2000) 4MB / 8MB Fast Ram Memory Expansion board With CF Card IDE support" from Kipper2k. There is still a list for them I think though.

http://kipper2k.com/amigaforsale/

Cant beat a CF card and 8MB in a A2000.

I have one on order which I was going to use in my A500 Plus but IF it can work on an A2000 easily i'll do that.

---------- Post added at 11:22 ---------- Previous post was at 11:21 ----------

Question is... For now is there a way to boot the IDE hard drive using the Tandem IDE ?

I know the Tandem does not support auto-boot but i'm sure there is some way to boot Workbench from it.
 
You could make a boot disk that loads the Tandem drivers and loads Workbench from the HDD, probably needs some Assign magic in S:Startup-Sequence.

If you plan to use an accelerator I'm not sure that Kipper's card will work with that.
 
You could make a boot disk that loads the Tandem drivers and loads Workbench from the HDD, probably needs some Assign magic in S:Startup-Sequence.

If you plan to use an accelerator I'm not sure that Kipper's card will work with that.

Thanks i'll see about the boot disk.

Has anyone got a sample of the startup-sequence i can use pleaes ?
 
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I look at it as a one time investment. Agreed it is expensive, but they work perfectly without issues.

And SATA is a standard that will be around awhile... There are other SATA to SCSI Bridges but I like the enclosed case of the Acard ARS2000...
 
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