|
|
Post by Sinistral on Aug 20, 2007 18:03:51 GMT
Hi guys,
I dont know anything about Amiga, seems i missed this back in the day.
I picked up an amiga 1200 and a load of games/apps from a car boot sale on sunday.
I had always thought these had a hard disk inside them. but it seems there is only a floppy disk drive, this means that some games require me to constantly swap 6-8 disks, which is slightly annoying!
I wanted to fit a hard disk inside. i understand a 2.5" hdd is required similar to a laptop hdd.
My question is... will any hdd work? i know i need a cable also. but once i install the new hdd how does the amiga detect it? how do i install workbench onto the hdd?
|
|
|
|
Post by northerngooner on Aug 20, 2007 18:09:27 GMT
Hi guys, I dont know anything about Amiga, seems i missed this back in the day. I picked up an amiga 1200 and a load of games/apps from a car boot sale on sunday. I had always thought these had a hard disk inside them. but it seems there is only a floppy disk drive, this means that some games require me to constantly swap 6-8 disks, which is slightly annoying! I wanted to fit a hard disk inside. i understand a 2.5" hdd is required similar to a laptop hdd. My question is... will any hdd work? i know i need a cable also. but once i install the new hdd how does the amiga detect it? how do i install workbench onto the hdd? I think the best person to speak to would be Playgen  |
|
|
|
Post by playgeneration on Aug 20, 2007 18:25:27 GMT
The 1200 doesn't include a hard drive as standard, some bundles came with a HD installed but as they were expensive and had tiny drives not many people bought them. The only Amigas that always had hard drievs installed were the 3000 and 40000. The 1200 has a standard 2.5" IDE connector inside, 2.5" hard drives are the same as laptop ones - a 3.5" PC drive would have been too big to fit inside. You can use any 2.5" ide drive, but workbench 3.0 and its standard filesystem only support 4gig drives. But since amiga software and games is generally very small, even a 1gig drive will give you tons of room for stuff, much more than you'd need most likely. If you really want a bigger drive thats no problem either, as theres updates to workbench that fix the problem. A 2.5" hard drive is powered by the IDE cable, not like 3.5" drives which have a seperate connector. Once the drive is installed, you can set it up by using the Workbench extras disk (i think - perhaps one of the others, its been a long time) which has the HDToolbox program on it, which you can use to format/partition the drive. Once the drive is recognized on workbench, simply drag all the contents from the workbench disks straight over onto the hard drive, then the harddrive will boot from itself. Its possible to use 3.5" hard drive if you want, and add more than one drive onto the amiga IDE connector, such as CD drives etc - Ive got two hard drives, a CD drive and Zip drive in mine |
|
Aypok
Sonic the Hedgehog
Posts: 2,372
|
Post by Aypok on Aug 20, 2007 22:14:32 GMT
But since amiga software and games is generally very small, even a 1gig drive will give you tons of room for stuff, much more than you'd need most likely. Definitely. I used to have a 2GiB drive in mine (before I killed the drive...) - I installed pretty much everything I could find and only ended up using about 500MiB (after about two years). I've now got a 4GiB drive in there - hardly any of it is used... Remember that disks are 880KiB; so a two disk game will take up roughly 1.5MiB - hardly anything in this day and age! Once the drive is installed, you can set it up by using the Workbench extras disk (i think - perhaps one of the others, its been a long time) which has the HDToolbox program on it, which you can use to format/partition the drive. If you can't find it on the disk labeled Workbench Extras 3.0 - try looking for a disk called Workbench HD Install 3.0. Although you won't likely have it if your Amiga didn't come with a hard drive. I'm sure one of us Amiga users will be able to get you a disk with the required software. :) Its possible to use 3.5" hard drive if you want, and add more than one drive onto the amiga IDE connector, such as CD drives etc - Ive got two hard drives, a CD drive and Zip drive in mine :) It's worth noting that if you want more than one IDE device connected at a time, you'll need something called an "IDE Buffer" (it's a small card/PCB). Trying to connect two or more IDE devices without one will (apparently) damage the IDE controller on the motherboard. They're not hard to pick up and they're very useful - I've got a 3.5" HD and an IDE CD-ROM connected to mine (all thanks to PlayGen! :D). |
|
|
|
Post by rupert on Aug 20, 2007 22:22:23 GMT
on a more fun note.. have you got Stunt car racer?!?! I used to love that game ;D
|
|
|
|
Post by playgeneration on Aug 20, 2007 22:25:04 GMT
I sure do have that game, its brilliant, actually its about time I played it again I've even got the c64 version on cartridge, not played it though since my c64 never worked preoperly and eventually died altogether  |
|
Aypok
Sonic the Hedgehog
Posts: 2,372
|
Post by Aypok on Aug 20, 2007 22:31:54 GMT
on a more fun note.. have you got Stunt car racer?!?! I used to love that game ;D Yes, yes I do. And it is indeed great fun. I used to hook up my two A1200s with a null-modem cable and play it in two-player mode with my siblings. That was awesome! :) |
|
|
|
Post by Sinistral on Aug 22, 2007 18:33:23 GMT
Thanks for the info guys. I bought an ide cable on ebay for £2.99 and i have a spare 2.5" hdd from an old laptop. It is 60GB, but I don't mind losing this.
I don't have the workbench extras disk I’m afraid. Is there anywhere online this can be downloaded?
General question though - what file system will the hdd be formatted to? Does Amiga use FAT?
|
|
|
|
Post by playgeneration on Aug 22, 2007 18:42:23 GMT
Amiga doesn't use FAT - thats a PC thing, it has its own file system, Fast File System is the one you'll be using.
Amiga floppy disks also use the different format, they use low density disks, formatted at 880k. You can use PC FAT formatted 720k disks too though, you need to get the PC DOS Driver put in the DEVS folder on the bootable drive before the PC floppies will be recognized. I think thats on the Workbench Extras disk too.
I'll get some workbench floppy disks and see whats on them now, my memory on them is a bit faint as I havent had to install or use them in years. I'll report back in a moment.
|
|
|
|
Post by playgeneration on Aug 22, 2007 19:06:17 GMT
Right then the PC dos driver to get PC formatted 720k disks working is on the Workbench Storage disk. Its called PC0, just drag it into the workbench DEVS folder - you may have to select Window>Show>All Files from the top menu to see these files as they are hidden system files. HDToolBox isn't on my Workbench Extras disk, infact it wasn't on any of the disks  which just seems wrong to me. You might be able to format the drive anyway, as it may show up on workbench as a "  ?" drive, which you can just click on and format. To use the full 60gig without partioning the drive into 4gig patitions you need the update to the fast file system, which is here: aminet.net/disk/misc/ffstd64.lha |
|
which just seems wrong to me. You might be able to format the drive anyway, as it may show up on workbench as a "
?" drive, which you can just click on and format.