A3000 scsi

[Guho]

I have an A3000D with 100Mbyte SCSI hard drive. I would like to upgrade the internal hard drive and have read the FAQ. Is it better to use the 50-pin cable with an adapter to 68 pins at the drive end, or better to use an adapter at the motherboard and use a 68-pin cable? Is there room under the hard drives to have this adapter or will it be too tall? Is it easy to have an AmigaDOS FFS boot partition of 4GB and then another PFS partition for the rest of it?

[Jope]

You can do it either way you wish, whatever fits better physically. There is not that much room between the drive tray and the motherboard, however, but if you have a 50-68 adapter that has a bit of flat cable between the connectors, it will probably fit better.

You can have FFS in the beginning and PFS3 for the rest if you like. If you have 2.04 or newer ROMs, you can have it all as PFS3 too thanks to directscsi.

I personally have 1.4 ROMs and have a 1MB or so FFS partition that only has the kickstart + a stub startup-sequence that moves the system assigns to my rest-of-disk PFS3 partition and continues execution from the startup-sequence there.

[thomas]

Originally Posted by Guho

Is it easy to have an AmigaDOS FFS boot partition of 4GB and then another PFS partition for the rest of it?

If you use PFS you should use it for all partitions. It does not make sense to make the boot partition slow if there is a fast file system available. (And yes, Kickstart can be loaded from a PFS partition.)

[Hedeon]

An FYI: 80 pins adapters (and HDs) also work.

[Jope]

Originally Posted by thomas

(And yes, Kickstart can be loaded from a PFS partition.)

Nice, I wonder why I couldn't get this to work back when I was setting the machine up. Knowledge updated, thanks.

[thomas]

Originally Posted by Jope

back when

I suppose that was before PFS3AIO?

[Jope]

Originally Posted by thomas

I suppose that was before PFS3AIO?

Yes, the OS install is from the late 2000's. I just gave it a go in WinUAE and the final registered PFS3-020 worked just fine. I'll try it again on real hardware in the near future when I start from scratch with 3.2.1.

[thomas]

With PFS3AIO you can dual-boot 1.3 and 3.2.

http://aminet.net/package/disk/misc/pfs3aio

PFS3-020 does not work on 1.3.

[Jope]

Originally Posted by thomas

With PFS3AIO you can dual-boot 1.3 and 3.2.

http://aminet.net/package/disk/misc/pfs3aio

PFS3-020 does not work on 1.3.

Oh yes, I don't run the old version anywhere.

I quickly tried it in the emu because I was wondering whether the pre-aio version crashes under 1.4. :-)

[Guho]

My A3000 ROM is the type which reads the final kickstart from HDD. I read somewhere that prevents me from booting from a large, over 4GB SCSI. Is it true? Should I burn 27C400 eproms with 3.1.4 or 3.2.1 kickstart?

[Jope]

Over 4GB support depends on the filesystem handler you use, if you choose a directscsi capable filesystem, partitions larger than/after 4GB will work.

If you don't have the need to boot into other versions of the operating system, then it might be worth burning new ROMs. Version 3.2.1 supports being loaded from hard disk, so it isn't totally necessary.

[Guho]

Hello again, to report back I upgraded to a 10k.7 300GB Cheetah hard drive. Despite the high rpm it is a lot quieter than the previous hard drive. I installed pfs3aio and created system, programs and work partitions. The hdinst util worked great to create the partitions and clone the files. Now I thought to upgrade my -04 scsi chip but wound up with a WD33C9A-PL 00-06 marked PROTO. Is this better than my -04? I was hoping to get -08, which was in the Aliexpress listing photo.

[Jope]

Newer is better. Don't worry about the PROTO marking.

The AMD -16 revision is the best, if you can find a genuine one.

[Guho]

Originally Posted by Jope

Newer is better. Don't worry about the PROTO marking.

The AMD -16 revision is the best, if you can find a genuine one.

Speaking of genuine: I bought this
https://www.ebay.com/itm/402631455378

and it works but it looks strangely shiny. This seller has terrific feedback. How can I tell if I received the bug-free version? Is there any register I could query or test I could do that only the PL-00-08 or AMD version could pass?