mrcity
Experienced Member
Hey folks, thought I'd share my latest retrocomputing victory... :D
Last Christmastime, I picked up an Amiga 2000 from channelmaniac who lives about 20 minutes from me. It runs lowly AmigaOS 2.0, not 3.9 much less 3.1. But combine that with the external SCSI CD-ROM drive I got a while ago (IBM 73H2600 8x drive -- whose enclosure was cannibalized for a 1GB hard drive for my Mac Plus), and it left me the perfect opportunity to remove the combo 5.25"/3.5" FDD currently in the 5.25" slot hooked up to the A2386SX board and install that CD-ROM drive itself into the Amiga.
At first, I went about trying to use an Adaptec AHA-1540B in the ISA slot to see if it would recognize the CD drive. (Don't make too much fun of me for that, I've barely messed around with big-box Amigas.
) After reading various threads around the Internet, several tools, commands, and places to check for on the file system were mentioned, but trying to follow up on these things led to dead ends since I basically couldn't even see what they saw. Then I made an important realization: my A2091 card is running the SCSI hard drive containing the OS, so maybe I could put it in through there.
The HDD on the A2091 is a Fujitsu M1603SAU 544MB hard drive made prior to 11/1995. Because of this, I couldn't find what "termination resistor" the remaining instructions left on the Internet were referring to, so eventually I just had to leave it to the retrocomputing gods that it wouldn't terminate the bus before my CD-ROM drive, thus leaving me with some unknown tiny surface-mount termination resistor to remove from somewhere. Nevertheless, I was able to verify it had the SCSI ID of 0, and after searching quite a while for the jumpers on the CD-ROM drive (only to realize they're on the back as usual, duh!), I set its SCSI ID to 3.
I sifted through a bunch of floppy disks I got from a scavenger who showed up at the local AmigaMCCC user group meeting a couple months ago, and stumbled upon the "CDx CD-ROM System for Amiga Computers", by Xetec. It's a 2-disk set, but I only needed Disk 1, and the serial number listed on the front was totally irrelevant. (For me, software serial numbers have always been for copy protection, not just as an FYI!) I had no idea if this would be for IDE or SCSI drives. Fortunately, this software makes it really convenient for installing SCSI CD-ROM drives, as you can actually have it scan all the devices on your SCSI bus and it will report back to you what it found. The first time around, with the Adaptec controller, it didn't pick up on that SCSI bus at all -- only the one from the A2091 with the HDD on it. Once I added the CD-ROM drive to the A2091's SCSI bus, the CDx software picked up on my IBM CD-ROM drive and it handled all the system configuration tasks for me.
The final step was to actually read data from the CD-ROM drive. Once I actually dug one up and shoved it in the drive, nothing came up on the Workbench at first. I tried running the commands to mount the drive as listed in the text manual, but it seemed to be unfamiliar with "cd0". Then I went into the CDx configuration tool (now installed on the hard drive) and made sure that Auto-boot on Startup was selected, and upon rebooting the computer, there's my CD showing as an icon on Workbench! However, upon double-clicking its icon, it didn't show any of the files. I needed to go into the Shell and do a directory listing before seeing the files.
Now that I've had success with this, I'm going to burn that image of Video Toaster I just downloaded onto a CD-ROM and install it onto my A2000. But for that to work decently at all, I'll need a 68060 CPU (not just the 68030 that's in there now), probably more memory, possibly a bigger hard drive and an AmigaOS upgrade, and...oh yeah... the Video Toaster card itself! Luckily I know some guys around town who should have cards...
So yeah, if you want to tell me how easy that made my life, or ask for this disk image, or etc., feel free to reply below.
Last Christmastime, I picked up an Amiga 2000 from channelmaniac who lives about 20 minutes from me. It runs lowly AmigaOS 2.0, not 3.9 much less 3.1. But combine that with the external SCSI CD-ROM drive I got a while ago (IBM 73H2600 8x drive -- whose enclosure was cannibalized for a 1GB hard drive for my Mac Plus), and it left me the perfect opportunity to remove the combo 5.25"/3.5" FDD currently in the 5.25" slot hooked up to the A2386SX board and install that CD-ROM drive itself into the Amiga.
At first, I went about trying to use an Adaptec AHA-1540B in the ISA slot to see if it would recognize the CD drive. (Don't make too much fun of me for that, I've barely messed around with big-box Amigas.
) After reading various threads around the Internet, several tools, commands, and places to check for on the file system were mentioned, but trying to follow up on these things led to dead ends since I basically couldn't even see what they saw. Then I made an important realization: my A2091 card is running the SCSI hard drive containing the OS, so maybe I could put it in through there.The HDD on the A2091 is a Fujitsu M1603SAU 544MB hard drive made prior to 11/1995. Because of this, I couldn't find what "termination resistor" the remaining instructions left on the Internet were referring to, so eventually I just had to leave it to the retrocomputing gods that it wouldn't terminate the bus before my CD-ROM drive, thus leaving me with some unknown tiny surface-mount termination resistor to remove from somewhere. Nevertheless, I was able to verify it had the SCSI ID of 0, and after searching quite a while for the jumpers on the CD-ROM drive (only to realize they're on the back as usual, duh!), I set its SCSI ID to 3.
I sifted through a bunch of floppy disks I got from a scavenger who showed up at the local AmigaMCCC user group meeting a couple months ago, and stumbled upon the "CDx CD-ROM System for Amiga Computers", by Xetec. It's a 2-disk set, but I only needed Disk 1, and the serial number listed on the front was totally irrelevant. (For me, software serial numbers have always been for copy protection, not just as an FYI!) I had no idea if this would be for IDE or SCSI drives. Fortunately, this software makes it really convenient for installing SCSI CD-ROM drives, as you can actually have it scan all the devices on your SCSI bus and it will report back to you what it found. The first time around, with the Adaptec controller, it didn't pick up on that SCSI bus at all -- only the one from the A2091 with the HDD on it. Once I added the CD-ROM drive to the A2091's SCSI bus, the CDx software picked up on my IBM CD-ROM drive and it handled all the system configuration tasks for me.
The final step was to actually read data from the CD-ROM drive. Once I actually dug one up and shoved it in the drive, nothing came up on the Workbench at first. I tried running the commands to mount the drive as listed in the text manual, but it seemed to be unfamiliar with "cd0". Then I went into the CDx configuration tool (now installed on the hard drive) and made sure that Auto-boot on Startup was selected, and upon rebooting the computer, there's my CD showing as an icon on Workbench! However, upon double-clicking its icon, it didn't show any of the files. I needed to go into the Shell and do a directory listing before seeing the files.
Now that I've had success with this, I'm going to burn that image of Video Toaster I just downloaded onto a CD-ROM and install it onto my A2000. But for that to work decently at all, I'll need a 68060 CPU (not just the 68030 that's in there now), probably more memory, possibly a bigger hard drive and an AmigaOS upgrade, and...oh yeah... the Video Toaster card itself! Luckily I know some guys around town who should have cards...
So yeah, if you want to tell me how easy that made my life, or ask for this disk image, or etc., feel free to reply below.
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