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[ami500]

Ok, I finally got my amiga up and running today with workbench 1.3. I found that it was giving some sort of error when I tried to access the hdd. (20meg WD XT drive).

I tried to inititalize it and it went through the entire procedure. But when it had finished, it started beeping and said initialization failed. I tried it twice and that happened.

Is it time to get a SCSI drive instead?

[Jope]

Yes. See your transfer times increase 10000 fold (150kB/s -> 1,5MB/s)..

Have a lot of fun while taking a sledgehammer to the crappy XT mechanism. :-)

[Effy]

If you want a kicking A500 then get a kickstart 3.1 and a scsi controller in your A590 (or a A590 with a scsi controller inside). You can forget about OS 3.9 but it is perfectly possible to run OS 3.1, providing you have a bit more than just 512 Kb Ram. The scsi controller will also allow you to use up to a 4 Gb harddisc if you don´t make any modifications. If you use another filesystem that is modded then you can use everything over the 4 Gb barrier I think. But 4 Gb on an A500 is enough to start with. The controller may also allow you to use a scsi cdrom which is very cool is you´re only used to floppies !!! I used to have a Mtec 68020i in my A500+ with 4 Mb Simm on it, and that really rocked at that time !!

[Jope]

All A590s are SCSI controllers.. :-)

Sorry for being such a nitpick, that's just the way I am.

[ami500]

Effy wrote:
If you want a kicking A500 then get a kickstart 3.1 and a scsi controller in your A590 (or a A590 with a scsi controller inside). You can forget about OS 3.9 but it is perfectly possible to run OS 3.1, providing you have a bit more than just 512 Kb Ram. The scsi controller will also allow you to use up to a 4 Gb harddisc if you don´t make any modifications. If you use another filesystem that is modded then you can use everything over the 4 Gb barrier I think. But 4 Gb on an A500 is enough to start with. The controller may also allow you to use a scsi cdrom which is very cool is you´re only used to floppies !!! I used to have a Mtec 68020i in my A500+ with 4 Mb Simm on it, and that really rocked at that time !!

The A590 I have has both the XT and SCSI interfaces in it.

I've also got the 512K RAM upgrade in the amiga itself. (I've actually got two, I didn't expect my amiga to come with one already in it and I bought another before the amiga arrived). And both expansions I did the Lithium ION battery upgrade to.

And I'm in the process of getting some RAM to stick into the A590. (16 256kx4 cmos chips). Good thing about that RAM is that it was commonly used on old trident ISA vga cards.

Where I'd get a kickstart 3.1 rom is beyond me. There doesn't seem to be any amiga outlets local here in AU.

And I knew that it could take up to a 4gig drive, (I found that out in another thread here), but, does a 4.3gig drive qualify? I suppose it does as formatted it's a little less than 4gig. The reason I wonder this is because I see plenty of 50pin 4.3gig SCSI drives on ebay.

[Effy]

Jope : appearantly it´s not just a scsi controller but also xt controller in a A590 ...

Ami500 : if you use standard OS 3.1 then you can access the first 4 Gb of any harddrive, even if it´s 40 Gb big. Note that your boot partition may be maximum 2 Gb, so that you actually will have two partitions of 2 Gb on a 4 Gb hd ...

About Australian sites, found these on my searchengine :
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Amiga_Users_Group_Vic/
http://www.amigaos4downunder.org/
http://snurb.info/
http://www.unitechelectronics.com/amigasellout.htm

Hope it will help you out. If not then pop in at http://www.vesalia.de

[Jope]

Effy wrote:
Jope : appearantly it´s not just a scsi controller but also xt controller in a A590 ...

Yeps, it has both.

The A2091 has both too, but the XT connector and led header aren't present.

I was just playing with the fact that you said the OP needs to install a SCSI controller into his A590 - he doesn't have to since it already is a SCSI controller :-)

f you want a kicking A500 then get a kickstart 3.1 and a scsi controller in your A590 (or a A590 with a scsi controller inside).

[ami500]

Jope wrote:

Yeps, it has both.

The A2091 has both too, but the XT connector and led header aren't present.

I was just playing with the fact that you said the OP needs to install a SCSI controller into his A590 - he doesn't have to since it already is a SCSI controller :-)

Funny thing is it has the solder pads for a 2nd XT header and power supply.