As I mentioned in another thread I am once again an Amiga owner! Now the proud owner of my previously owned Amiga 3000. I sold it to a buddy in 1992 or so when I replaced it with an Amiga 4000. A few days ago, almost 20 years later, I found that he still had the Amiga in storage.
 
 
Please forgive me because although I lurk around here to reminisce and follow the current Amiga scene, I haven't used one in probably 15-18 years.
 
 
It's an early Amiga 3000, pre-ordered and received just after release, with the Kickstart ROM tower.
 
 
I took it apart and cleaned it up to see what's going on. My main goal would be to restore it to as close to factory condition as possible, perhaps some reliability upgrades but nothing that would take it too much away from stock. Once I get it up and running it will be mostly to reminisce and perhaps play some games, nothing too crazy.
 
 
Here are some photos and questions I have:
 
 
- What can/should I do about the ROM tower? If you look at this pic, you'll see that 2 pins seem to have broken off inside the sockets (upper socket, left-most pins). If I remember correctly, one may have broken off way back when I originally owned it. The other may have broken off today when I removed the tower. However, even with 2 broken pins the machine boots and prompts for a Kickstart file. Not sure if this means it will operate fine without these broken pins or what. Even if it does, can I load Kickstart 3.1 off disk? Or should I just buy a set of ROMs? If so, what ROMs would I need?
 

 

 

 
- The battery looks in overall good condition, but there does seem to be some corrosion and leakage below it. I want to de-solder and replace this battery ASAP. Any tips? What can I replace it with? I am definitely not very good at soldering:
 

 
 
- There is a strange cable that you can also see in the above pic that's soldered to the motherboard near the flicker fixer switch. Seems to have some sort of adjustment screw on the end of it. Doesn't look very stock. Anyone know what that is? Doesn't ring a bell for me at all.
 

 

 
- The system doesn't boot with the hard drive attached, giving the error listed below. I'm suspecting a bad hard disk. What's my best bet to get this thing up and running disk-wise? I was thinking of using a CF card, but SCSI card readers seem expensive and I'm not sure how to get IDE on a 3000. I may have some SCSI hard drives kicking around the office, if I do I may go that route. I also noticed the SCSI terminator sockets are empty on the motherboard.  Do terminators need to be installed here if nothing is attached to the external SCSI port?  I'm wondering if that also could be why the hard disk is not booting.
 

 
- System came with a floppy drive installed, but it did not appear to be the stock unit. Eject button certainly doesn't match the front of the case. It's a Chinon FB-354. What's my chances of getting a replacement floppy drive with button that matches the front of the case? Once I get it running, what's the best way to get software to/from the Amiga? Ethernet? CF card? Something else?
 
- System did not have a mouse. What's my best chance of getting a fairly stock replacement? eBay? Can't do too much without that!
 
Well, I think that's it for now! Really appreciate any help anyone can offer.

about the strange cable, perhaps its an extender to the scandoubler fine tuning.

The ROMs you have are the early softkick or SuperKickstart ROMs, if you don't intend to install a CPU card (your ROMs require the 68030 to work) you can actually get a 3.1 Kickstart file to boot from.  The only pain about that is getting the hard drive partitions named and set up right for the SuperKickstart ROMs to be able to find your kickstart file.  It would be easier to just grab a set of 3.1 chips for a 3000 from eBay and stick them in your tower, I wouldn't worry about the odd pins stuck in the sockets on the board, as far as I've heard those two sockets aren't useful on that revision motherboard.

Interesting project ahead of you. It must have been a killer machine in the days with 16 Mb fast.

I'd go for the 3.1 chips, just because it's... so much easier than the hazzle with softkicking. And sooner or later you probably want to upgrade the CPU anyway.

I would also check out the Buster chip, get a rev 11 of eBay. Same thing with the WD SCSI chip, it looks like you have rev 4, I believe rev 8 is the latest to look for.

That wire is the vga tuner. i have the stock scsi on my a3k and runs a 36 gig hd just fine.. of course using the 4 gig limit with ffs but you can always use the sfs and go above that. buster i wouldn't worry about that right now, i do believe that just gains you dma with zorror 3 . get the coin battary , they are cheap. I put a drive in from one of my a500's and it works just fine as df1: with a few mods to the metal chassis and slips in fine. Want to go cheap? get a null modem cable (i use parallel) and dump everything to the amiga with networked drives on a pc.  Maybe i make a video. hope this helps.
http://eab.abime.net/showthread.php?t=51809&highlight=a3k
Also use nail varnish where the battery leaked to protect the motherboard from any more damage.

lost

Scratch that - tried another null modem cable and it looks like I'm in business! I have a SCSI card reader from a4000t.com on order as well since the hard drive in this system seems to be toast.

AFAIR there's a looong timeout for the 1st HDD in some Kickstarts.

Another quick question, for anyone familiar with this old Super Kickstart from disk crap.
 
I'd like to configure this hard drive as it was originally.
 
 - I know I need a WB_2.x: partition.  Can this be the only partition, or would I simply make this a small partition and have a standard DH0: partition along with it?
 
 - Do I need a WB_1.3: partition if don't want to boot to 1.3?
 
 - I know the Super Kickstart files need to be in WB_2.x:devs/kickstart.  I assume "kickstart" needs to be a drawer containing the file?  If so, does the filename matter?  Or is the file actually called "kickstart" and located in WB_s.x:devs?