Trying to get my A1200 up and running again and need some input.

[AlexW]

Hi, I'm new to this forum. Just registered today.

My Amiga A1200 (a bit modified) was last running I think about 1995-96, and have some free time so I thought I try to get it working again (it ran "fine" last time I used it in c:a 1995-96).
It had 2 3.5" drives (as far as I can remember it was 1 80 Mb and one 120 Mb) or could been 120+200 also but these drives are nowhere to be found at this moment.

Found pretty much everything in pieces (moved around a couple of times sin it's last use) so pieced it together with the original floppy drive and powered it on. It was lighting up, but no picture out of the Composite video signal... so after some on/off trying different things the A1200 finally showed the bootlogo screen!!!
It is now running with a GVP A1230+ 40Mhz with (I think 4 MB fastram) and with 68882.

But every disk I tried either does a software failure or "Not a DOS disk" requester popup. So I cleaned the floppy drive, and now it boots (at leasts gets further into the boot process on some disks).
My guess is the Software Failure part is that most of my disks are from the Amiga 500+ days and the small number of ones that was made by my Amiga A1200 is just too old and has so many magnetic failures and stuff that it's read errors and stuff. I will go thru at least a couple of 100 disks to see whats up but maybe you guys can shed some light on this. Does disks +25 years old stop working mostly? I would guess so myself but what is your experience?

Anyway my main goal is to use a 2.5 inch 40 GB drive (that I took out of a working IBM T40 Laptop) and got (from youtube a hint about the 2GB sys partion MAX which was great).
What I don't have right now though is 44 pin IDE cable to actually hook it up. But I found my 44-40 pin adapter so I was thinking I would make system using a 3.5" disk (I have about 10 ranging from 1 GB to 200 GB) to actually boot up into a working OS at least and that would checking my older floppys at lot easier.

But as of now, I can not boot any floppy so even if I get 1 40 pin 3.5" HDD working I can not install AmigaOS on it.

I thought there where maybe an option to install WinUAE (or some easy to use variant of UAE) to one of my older PC's that still has IDE/PATA connectors and follow this guide https://wordpress.hertell.nu/?p=859 to create a bootable HD that I could then transfer (physically) to my Amiga A1200 and boot it there.

But the only computer I have available capable of doing this is my PC running Rockstor (FreeNAS sort of thing) and it's a pain to reinstall. So I really would want (if there is any available) an "LiveCD/USB" bootable image that does boot into a working UAE so I can continue to mount my 3.5" HDD as a real Amiga HD and let UAE/Amiga partition/format it, install the OS and stuff and then just revert that back into the NAS again afterwards.

Is it possible?

I did eventually find a mouse also (the Commodore original is gone) but I can't get into the boot menu (was it not holding both mouse buttons during a reset or something to get into the boot menu?) could it be my GVP A1230 giving me problems?

Also found my AmigaCD32 and it booted just fine, so if my A1200 is not the way forward (it might be too flaky as it is so old, got some abuse when it was moved around) maybe the the CD32 is?

Networking? I had PCMCIA ethernet adaptor that I really liked, but this is nowhere to be found so I need something similar but it seems hard to find these days on stores (I checked some selling Amiga stuff).

Anyway would be so much fun to get this up and running again, and I will eventually go for the 2.5 inch 40 GB drive I think but need a cable for that and would have been nice to have a network capability so I just could fill the drive thru network/internet even though it is probably the slowest way possible :-)

Any thoughts?

----edit
Am I posting in the wrong subforum? got some error when posting (trying again).

My mouse seems to work but it needs repair/clean as left mouse button needs a haaaard press in the right spot to actually make a click.
And it seems I got inte to the boot menu when hooking up a random IDE drive.
Tested more floppies now and a couple of them actually works 100% not the ones I want to work but anyway! Was fun watching a "demo" I made 1992 :-) it seems that the ones that came from Amiga Magazines have a better chance of working!

anyway trying again!

[crazyc]

Easiest way is to get a cheap ide to cf or ide to sd adapter and use that as the hard drive. Makes it really easy to set up on a pc then transfer across, and take backups of for example.

[crazyc]

Re the network card its probably going to be either ebay or amibay. Or perhaps on the usual stores amigakit or amigastore.eu will have one?

[AlexW]

Originally Posted by crazyc

Easiest way is to get a cheap ide to cf or ide to sd adapter and use that as the hard drive. Makes it really easy to set up on a pc then transfer across, and take backups of for example.

Thanks for the reply!

Yes I think in the end I go for that also, but at the moment my budget is pretty tight.

[AlexW]

Originally Posted by crazyc

Re the network card its probably going to be either ebay or amibay. Or perhaps on the usual stores amigakit or amigastore.eu will have one?

Ah ok, I suspected that. I have checked both of these stores though and it does not look good. So Ebay or Amibay I think... or some local variant maybe.

[crazyc]

Originally Posted by AlexW

Thanks for the reply!

Yes I think in the end I go for that also, but at the moment my budget is pretty tight.

Can get away with a really cheap IDE to CF adapter from ebay.....

I tend to use 8gb CF cards as I can fit the full catalogue of games etc on there, and easily back it up on my PC by taking an image, and that way if I stuff up or the card gets corrupted it is an easy restore. no opening up the PC to connect to IDE headers or anything.

Once you have a functional system its easiest to run WINUAE and copy files from the PC onto the card (especially if there are a lot, like when you first setup your games files). You can then for example write FD image files like.ADFs back onto real disks on your a1200 itself if you like.

You could replace your floppy with a Gotek drive or similar - but I never really see the point with an a1200 as I just run everything via WHDLOAD from the hard drive.

[AlexW]

Originally Posted by crazyc

Can get away with a really cheap IDE to CF adapter from ebay.....

I tend to use 8gb CF cards as I can fit the full catalogue of games etc on there, and easily back it up on my PC by taking an image, and that way if I stuff up or the card gets corrupted it is an easy restore. no opening up the PC to connect to IDE headers or anything.

Once you have a functional system its easiest to run WINUAE and copy files from the PC onto the card (especially if there are a lot, like when you first setup your games files). You can then for example write FD image files like.ADFs back onto real disks on your a1200 itself if you like.

You could replace your floppy with a Gotek drive or similar - but I never really see the point with an a1200 as I just run everything via WHDLOAD from the hard drive.

Yes I like this! I don't want to replace my floppy just yet (or ever :-) as my hard drives for my A1200 are lost at the moment (and I don't think I will ever see them again) and that was at least 8 years of my own coding, graphics, music and so on (it hurts like hell!) but I still have some floppy's (but it's mostly A500 era and most of them are read errors on I guess by now).

So the IDE to CF thing seems like a great (best) option.
And after that getting a PCMCIA-ethernet thing up and running as I would really like some network (albeit slow) ability.

WHDLoad (I do not know that much about it) is ofc great! But I would really like to setup a environment that I sort of had back in the days for a bit of coding, and graphics and music stuff also...
So that is my main priority I guess... But again WHDLoad for games (and applications that might not be compatible with my setup would run I guess...)

Anyway thanks for your input!

[crazyc]

I use the networking basically for access to aminet, access to whdload.de to check and update those files, and to access my nas drive which I did use to transfer files between my pc and the amiga or between my amigas without removing the cf cards etc. Browsing generally is painful at best...
(Also looking up cd titles and correcting the time)
Both mine now have usb so I transfer files from the pc that way these days.
Oh and I agree about keeping the floppy drive if it works. I do occasionally use mine for fun!

[Jope]

Originally Posted by AlexW

But every disk I tried either does a software failure or "Not a DOS disk" requester popup. So I cleaned the floppy drive, and now it boots (at leasts gets further into the boot process on some disks).
My guess is the Software Failure part is that most of my disks are from the Amiga 500+ days and the small number of ones that was made by my Amiga A1200 is just too old and has so many magnetic failures and stuff that it's read errors and stuff. I will go thru at least a couple of 100 disks to see whats up but maybe you guys can shed some light on this. Does disks +25 years old stop working mostly? I would guess so myself but what is your experience?

Many will need you to disable caches in the early startup menu at the least, some will need a degrader, some will not run on the A1200. So try your initial tests with a workbench disk.

The drive's read write head sled is probably sticking on its rails a bit. A bit of lubrication there (sewing machine oil or similar, spread with a cotton swab) will help loosen it up, then you just need to move the head many times between track 0-79 until it starts moving properly.

[AlexW]

Thank you for the info! I got thru about 30-40 disks later on and some do work 100% (mostly magazine disks though) but 1 or 2 of my own creation :-) So I think the floppy is mostly in working order. Now I just have to find a one with HDToolbox on it so I can initialize/partition/format a HDD so I can backup the working disks up somehow. Guess there is an ADF "creator" out there on Aminet?

[AlexW]

Ok a little update, I found my Amiga A1200 install disk with HDToolbox, it finds the drive let me partition it (it's 2.5GB drive and I made 2 partitions). Everything seems fine, save changes and reboot to format the two partitions. They never show up? So going back to HDToolbox again to check, and everything seems fine... What to do?

I tried the HDSetup also on the Install disk and it actually seemed to create 2 partitions or at least 1 Partition called with Work: device name or something like that... but rebooted my machine again and it's all gone... frustrating! :-)


------edit

Ok it was something weird with that HDD I guess... Found another one (800 MB) and it worked perfectly (except it sounds that this one does not have so much life left)...