adding a hd to amiga 500

[dhe]

I'm trying to recreate the experience of using an Amiga 500 + 512K of expansion RAM and Kickstart 2.04.

I have that booting up just fine. I'd like to setup a hard drive that I could build out.

Since the A500 didn't come with a HD, I know there were various HD's add-on's made available.

I kind of expect the process to be:
1) Add a GVP Hard drive to the emulator.
2) Add some driver files in workbench.
3) Setup a file on the PC to act like the actually drive.

I've looked at documentation here:
https://www.vware.at/winuaehelp/CDHardDrives.html

Should I just add a hard file and all the magic above just happens?

thanks in advance.

[Marce]

for the A500 emulation in winuae is better and easier to setup any windows directory as hardisk
then is much more easy to replace or add files

[TCD]

Originally Posted by dhe

Should I just add a hard file and all the magic above just happens?

Yep. Just add a hard file or directory and it should work.

[thomas]

Originally Posted by dhe

Should I just add a hard file and all the magic above just happens?

It depends on how accurate your experience should be.

As mentioned by Marce the easiest way to have a harddrive is to just add a directory. It is bootable and will appear immediately as an icon on the Workbench desktop and you can copy files to it. You can also share files between Windows and AmigaOS easily.

But this is not a real harddrive.

The second easiest way is to add a hardfile. This gives you kind of a big floppy disk. You'll see a DH0:unformatted icon on the desktop which you can format and copy files to. It is bootable, too.

This is still not a real harddrive.

Next option is like above, but before you click Ok on the add harddrive panel, click on Full Drive/RDB Mode so that the button gets greyed out. Now you won't see anything on the desktop. You have to use a partitioning tool like HDToolbox or HDInstTools to initialize the drive and create one or more partitions. You have to point the tool to uaehf.device where it defaults to scsi.device, otherwise it won't see the harddrive. To make a partition bootable you have to enable that flag in the partitioning tool.

This *is* a real harddrive, but it is still connected to a virtual non-existing controller (neither IDE nor SCSI, just virtual).

Finally, go to the Expansions page, find your GVP among the SCSI controllers and select a ROM file for it (which you must have, see below). Then on the Add Harddrive panel, after you clicked on RDB Mode, change controller to GVP SCSI.

Now you have a real harddrive on a real SCSI controller and can use the GVP install disk to initialize the drive.

Sharing ROM files is an issue for copyright reasons. However, whenever Toni adds a new hardware to WinUAE he is so kind to upload his collection of ROMs to The Zone which is mirrored to the EAB file server. So just search the file server for expansion_boot_roms and you'll find several copies. Get the latest one and unpack it to WinUAE's Roms directory.

[dhe]

Thomas, thank you very much for the detailed explanation.

As I try not to be a burden on my fellow hobbyist is there documentation on WinUAE that will go into more detail then the documentation URL noted above, so that I can be more self supportive in the future?

[gimbal]

Youtube is always an option. If you don't like videos, then it is still a fallback option.

https://www.youtube.com/results?sear...rd+drive+setup