ScuzzBlog: Diaries June 2026
Entry 19th June 2026: Post 1: Amiga 1200 - Spike recovery .. I can't keep doing this.
Amiga 1200 - Spike recovery .. I can't keep doing this.
Three days ago I was simply aiming to take a couple of pics of my
Amiga 1200 called Spike and external SCSI drives, but then disaster
struck. I had lost the internal drive and with it all my settings
for the external SCSI drives.
Each day I have concluded I'll leave it for now and come back. And
each day I couldn't rest until it was sorted.
I decided today to use Helena in her full original state and fit
the Blizzard 1230IV Turbo so leaving Spike as a carcass. This may
sound a bit cruel but I really can't leave Spike in a halfway
house state so now he sits waiting full recovery. Just as I said
on the first day.
Problem now was getting Helena configured to see the external SCSI
drives, CD-ROM and ZIP. Not a simple task given the back-up for
Spike is on ZIP ... The old chicken and egg. It is not helped by
my other two A1200s with ZIP using different SCSI devices. Chantel
uses the 1230scsi.device being fitted with the Blizzard SCSIKit,
and the machine up here uses the SurfSquirrel.
I scanned the SCSI and enabled the main external drive which was
a great relief as it was the one with the main archives. The other
drive whilst being recognised is not playing ball at the moment,
giving out an incorrect drive size. At least the drives appear on
the Workbench. I guess I have to reformat. Avoiding that at the
moment.
The ZIP simply needed the drivers in the DEVS DOSDrivers drawer and
edited for the SquirrelSCSI. I did remove the drive to check it was
set to Unit5 and terminated.
The CD also needed the CD0 driver and this needed to be edited to
the squirrel device. When you look at these things in DOpus the
icon/file comes in the normal format of tool and icon. The icon
can be edited from DOpus, whereas the main tool need a text editor
to change the entry. I use CED. I also copied over the CD file
system to L which is AmiCDFS if I recall. There are numerous.
I had to also edit the Squirrel HDToolbox cus is was set to scsi.device
and not squirrelscsi.device. This picks up all the drives and now
they are mounted they give out a reassuring boot handshake to say
they are mounted.
Anyhoo.. as I am taken to say, the main archive, CD and ZIP are
all working along with the internal new drive. I also installed
the FAT95 and CrossDOS for the DF1: external high density drive.
And with just that one absentee I have the whole system working
again. I am currently reinstating the Workbench and Work files
from the ZIP archive, noting that I am no longer going to use the
OS3.9 operating system. Personally I hate the thing but hey.
The amount of time I spend just getting back to where I started
amazes me sometimes. I so often give thought to not bothering
given the amount of working kit I have, but sadly my inner self
just won't let me rest. Reading through the blogs you will find
numerous examples of where I was minded to give up but didn't.
There is no greater joy than seeing you kit working again. It is
without doubt the most rewarding aspect of what I do especially
as I am blessed with such a wonderful computer in the Amiga. I
mean how can you leave her busted like that ?
Happy days. One more project to add to the list but for now I
can get back to what I was doing. Or not. Who knows.
PS I had to take pics of the kit at the end in a dim light as
I hadn't set the light up so I cheated and added an old image
but I included a very yellow fuzzy pic from today for reference.
Amiga 1200 - Spike recovery .. I can't keep doing this.
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