ScuzzBlog: Diaries February 2026
Entry 17th February 2026: Post 1: Amiga 600HD - So many problems.
Amiga 600HD - So many problems.
I do have to remind those that take the time to read what I write
that the purpose of the blog is to record just what I do each day.
I don't record everything, and today I realised why it is important
to make notes, no matter how brief, cus I have lost something and
with such a vast collection finding anything here is a nightmare.
With that said I will continue ...
I was trying to uncover the location of a 60GB hard drive that I
had successfully installed on an A600HD together with the contents
of a former Yahoo Groups A600 hard drive loaded with AMOS stuff.
I was given a copy of the contents of a fellow Amigans hard drive
in the hope I could safely look after them. The drive is also
copied to three ZIP discs.
The whole process took a couple of days in October 2019 and I have
included the blog below.
The problem starts with the Amiga 600 that I chose to use for the
exercise.
To my knowledge the A600HD has never worked from the day it first
arrived here. It had a faulty floppy, mouse and keyboard plus no
hard drive.
Over the period of a month or so I finally got the A600 working.
I discovered the read head on the floppy drive had detached from
its mount. I replaced the very long ribbon cable. I swapped out
the keyboard , albeit with a badly yellowed one with one missing
key. Unfortunately the commuter refused to boot into the hard drive
without a floppy being in the drive.
I decided against better judgment in truth to build the AMOS
packed drive into this machine using a 60GB hard drive. There is
a little trick I use to fool the Amiga that it is only 4GB in
size. Works generally very well.
All seemed to be OK and I even returned later to repair the
missing button.... 'ish.
Disaster struck a couple of years later when trying to use an
Amiga to PC link up cable. The motherboard just fell apart. First
the mouse and then the hard drive interface. The machine suffered
very badly from capacitor rot and the process had rendered the
Amiga pretty useless. And all my fault. I know that.
Moving on I obviously removed the hard drive .. but where did I
put it? Looks bewildered at the very small needle in a very large
haystack. Sadly I made no records that final day and so have no
idea what I did with the hard drive. Why I chose now to try and
find the drive relates to the AMOS data on the drive.
And so I have spent two days checking over seven Amiga 600s and
numerous storage areas to no avail. Very frustrating. I have
even had the busted A600 on the bench and was amazed to discover
she was still working. Sadly though the hard drive was not inside.
I also tried other A600s with more joy as they appeared to work
with no problem. Always fun that.
So the moral here is always to record what you do, no matter how
trivial it may seem at the time. None of the pictures below will
make that much sense. They are there to remind me. The rather
telling pic is the one with all the sticky labels on the back
of the A600. Bit like the scribble in the Python book .. 'damn
it, damn it, damn it'. Amounts to the same thing.
Anyhoo I had a spark of an idea which involves the A1200 that I
used to format and create the hard drive for the A600. I may
just have returned the drive to that A1200. I just have to work
out which of my thirty A1200s it was.
Happy days.
Amiga 600HD - So many problems.
Previously on scuzzblog
Previously on scuzzblog: Amiga 600HD - Aliens are Cool.
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