A1200 HD Questions
 

I'm going to pick up an amiga technologies A1200 today, with blizzard 030 @ 50mhz and 150mb HD.

I want to install a 20 or 30 gig drive in it, but dont want to lose some of the stuff that is preinstalled.

I have bought a pcmcia network card to attach it to my network, so I can transfer to and from my pc.

I want to know if it's going to be possible to back up the harddrive, to my pc for instance and then transfer the whole thing back to the larger drive over the network. Will there be a problem if the partition size is different? And is this going to be a relatively easy operation to perform?

Also, am I going to have difficulties powering that setup with the included amiga tech power supply?

Thanks in advance for any help!

I don't know the rating of a ATech PSU, but if it is similar to the C one, better get an A500 PSU which is stronger...
If you make a working WB boot disk, that has all the drivers u need, I cannot see why you cannot restore to the HD
AFAIK, partition size is not a prob...
Also take a look at Amiga Explorer from Cloanto...

You don't need the PCMCIA network thign to start, WinUAE will recognize your Amiga drive if you connect it to the PC. This way, you can back it all up to your PC's HD and then back onto the new drive (which you can format and prepare on the PC using WinUAE too!).
Personally I wouldn't use a 20/30GB HD, it's just asking for troubles. Get a smaller one.

(gosh how many times have I dvertised WinUAE this week? :D)

That is quite impressive. The reason I'm after the 20/30gb drive is because I can get it for free and it's getting increasingly difficult to find <4gb drives on ebay.

I may try using WinUAE to set the whole thing up, definitely seems the quicker option than the network. I have a 2.5" to 3.5" adaptor somewhere, but from what I remember it had 1 too many pins on the 2.5" side, I might have to try and snap it off to see if that works. Has anyone had to do this before with such an adaptor?

thanks for the responses so far

NOpe, IIRC the extra pins are there for the power, dont snap them! The 2.5 drives get the power from the ribbon cable.

Read the boards thoroughly on how to install a 20GB HD. You might need to upgrade to OS 3.9 just to be safer.

Originally Posted by Akira
WinUAE will recognize your Amiga drive if you connect it to the PC. This way, you can back it all up to your PC's HD and then back onto the new drive (which you can format and prepare on the PC using WinUAE too!).


Does this work on a unformatted drive or must it be already formatted to AFS (I think thats what the 1200 uses) for it to work in the amiga after creating the image in winuae??

Will Winuae do this? Basically I want to take a 6 gig drive that a friend is giving me, format with winuae and set it up through winuae and then move it back to my a1200 to replace my current disk (WHDLOAD is great :laughing!!).
I know the HDF files remain in fat32 but don't know how winuae treats empty harddrives (or drives formatted to fat32 or nfts). Can it format the drive to afs or must I do this with the 1200?
:confused:confused

Within WinUAE, the drive will be treated as a normal Amiga drive and wil NOT be formatted with FAT32 or NTFS. You just have to format and install it in your PC and then take it into yuor Amiga. That simple.

And if you can be arsed, DON'T use FFS, use SFS.

May well try it. I'll do it through Winuae and see how it goes. Does it cause incompatibilities? I remember reading it did but I'm not sure was that with a beta version of it. It removes the 4 gig limit and along wth IDEfix I should be able to use the full drive. How big a drive can it handle out of interest?
Will SFS work fine with whdload and the old wb1.3 and wb 3.0/3.1 games?


I've been playing around with WHDLOAD under winuae.. My amigas are at my home address. I presume it won't cause a problem if I install on an a1200 config with 8 meg fastram even though my real a1200 doesn't have one(yet.. bought one but its still with a friend in the UK :banghead)..

Ok I've found the SFS website.. As I read it I can have a HD up to 2000gig so I should be ok for space ;)

I'll hook up the drive and give it a bash and see how it goes..

Thanks Akira

Just one quick question though .. Why do large 20 to 40 gig drives cause problems.. Too much power drain on the amiga?? Could it cause amiga to die if it needed to much power? :confused

Power issues aside (there shouldn't be much odf a problem, less with 2.5" HDs), the problem lies within the OS/Filesystem, which don't support these large capacities.