I'm having a few problems. A major long time ago (I don't expect anyone remembers we've all drunk a lot of beer or slept, or both, and/or survived christmas & new year at least twice since) I started out with Amigas with a little A600. After a bit of machination and building a custom PSU rig for it I found that the floppy drove was dead and cast it aside in favour of a 1200 with the intention of coming back to it 'sometime'.

Sometime was yesterday when I was donated a working A600 with badly yellowed casing and a pile of games (and Deluxe Paint III - wooohhooo!! ). I kinda hacked 2 machines out of one and Robert's your mother's brother it worked. Great.

Now I'd always intended to add a hard disk to it because I get sick of swapping floppies constantly just to boot Workbench. I booted the copy of Workbench 2.05 that came with it (yes on original disks - what treasure!!) and discovered it has no hard disk tools. Drat. I inserted the Amiga OS 3.1 install disk and tried HDToolbox and that seemed to work and I installed and partitioned the drive. I even, probably through more stupidity than anything else found it will boot Amiga OS 3.1 despite only having a 2.05 ROM. Interesting.

Anyway, the hard disk partitions show up on the desktop, as IHD0:NDOS and IDH1:NDOS as you'd expect them to, so it looks at least to the casual observer like that works. The problem comes when I try to format the partitions. The OS 3.1 formatter flat out won't run. The 2.05 formatter asks me to insert the disk IDH0 (normal) then warns it will erase everything (normal) then a dialog pops up that says 'Only Quick Format is allowed' then another that says 'Not enough memory'. The thing will format floppies perfectly well (although not using the 3.1 formatter) and has about 720k free CHIP RAM.

I know 1MB is an awfully small hole to run an OS in, even on an Amiga, but I refuse to believe you need a FastRAM card just to run a hard disk, did these machines not originally ship with hard disks in some guise? Granted mine is a little bit bigger than any sold with an Amiga (1.2GB split into 2x579MB partitions) but it is otherwise a perfectly standard (and working) IDE 2.5" hard disk.

Help. I'm stuck in a loop...  :pissed:

I installed an HD in my A600 not too long ago, and it took me a weekend to do it  :lol:
Once you've gotten the partitions to appear on the desktop, you want to just boot WB 2.05 up, then highlight the partition you want to format, then click on 'Format' in the top menu bar as you would a disk, that should take care of it.  :-)

zipper wrote:
Check how many buffers you are trying to use with those partitions, perhaps the buffers are eating too much memory.

Good thinking.

It looks like my 2.05 set is missing a disk as itdoesn't have an install disk. It's not that big a problem as I think 3.1 would work reasonably ok on it if I could get the hard disk working, I just would have to use the 2.05 format app in place of the 3.1 version which obviously doesn't like A600s (probably becuase of the old ROM, or lack of free memory or something).

I'll give that a shot, where would I check the nmumber of buffers? Maybe in HDToolbox?

BenShep

You have to put the Aminet 3Com driver in the Devs:Networks directory.  You have to make this directory first as it doesn't exist under a normal install.  There may also be a driver just to place in the devs: directory as well, can't remember.  Then you simply type in manually the device name under AmiTCP (I use Miami though).  I'll check tonight and send to you the driver if you can't get it running.

Oh, there's also a program to allow for pcmcia resets so you can hot plug the 3Com card.  More later....

Thanks Argus.

btw Miami Vs AmiTCP - which is better?

Ah yes that sounds right.  Oopsy.

I was fearing such an unhelpful post from amigakit.. and here it is.

Surely there is (or should be) some forum rule regarding shameless pimping of a business while contributing nothing (helpful) to the conversation?

It's basically spam.

Thats a bit unfair - we answer many emails helping Amigans every day and contribute to a few forums.  In fact it is a main priority to our make Amiga products more user-friendly that leads us to provide ready-to-go hard disks, network cards etc.

Anyway, apologies for the sparce reply above.
Looking at the problem, Workbench will not allow formatting of the hard disk- have you the correct version of the FastFileSystem in your L: directory?

A standard A600 memory will be fine for formatting of the hard disk drive- although reducing the buffers for the hard disk is an idea.  Also check that the drive's geometry is correctly setup in HDToolbox.

If you dont have access to HDToolbox we stock the AmigaOS Installation floppies.

Hope this helps....

@BenShep

If you are having trouble with the PCMCIA card, email and I will send you the AmigaKit Network CD as a lha file email attachment.  That has a full installer and AmiTCP to get the card working quickly on the Amiga.