ScuzzBlog: Diaries September 2021 Entry 5th September 2021: Post 1: Graham - The Amiga hard drive specialist. Graham - The Amiga hard drive specialist. Whenever I need to check, format , backup etc a 3.5 inch IDE hard drive I pull out my trusty A1200 in the A1500 case. The swapping out of the drives is so easy and this allows me to work on them in the quickest easiest way. Amazing that this little exercise took place in April of this year. I have an Amiga Technologies here next to me with an interface and external ribbon. This allows me to plug drives in at will. With all the work I have been doing on creating custom Bench disks I have kinda filled up the drive. So it was time to plug a new one into the system. I had this old busted IDE from a Win 98 machine. The drive is actually fine it was a case of a few corrupt files so I has happy to recycle the drive for the Amiga. This is how it is done. PS: Why Graham ? It was the name given by a guy at work when I pondered a name for a 1200 in a 1500. The name just stuck. Graham - The Amiga hard drive specialist. Meet Graham an A1200 in an A1500. The broken hard drive from the PC. I sit the drive on the shelf and connect to the buffered interface. The drive I am working on can just sit there. Quite safe. Note the 1200 motherboard in the A1500. I boot the install disk and use HDToolBox. The drive is not recognised. This is the list of previous drives saved on the Install Disk. My drive is not on the list. So I read the configuration from the disk. And now we have the Maxtor on the list. Click OK and there is the drive ready to partition. The HDToolBox defaults to two 4.GB drives. This is the largest that the Amiga can see. So we DELETE the second partition and work with just 4GB. Very important to ensure that the second partition is empty. So create a series of partitions that add up in total to just 4GB and no more. Next click Advanced Options and set the MaxTransfer to 0x1FE00 and press RETURN .. twice. You must press RETURN before saying OK or you will not save the settings. The MaxTransfer has to be changed or you will not be able to copy whole Amiga disks to the drive. They will become corrupt. Trust me. Make sure the drives are still all as they should be. That empty partition can sometimes be problematic. Make sure the partition you are going to use for Workbench DH0 is 'Bootable'. Only this partition needs to be bootable. The system will reboot and load using the Install Disk again... You should see the new partitions with garbled names. VERY IMPORTANT: Only ever 'Quick Format' drives. If you full format the partitions will wrap around and you will lose them. Name the partitions what you want. Next up use the Install disk to install the desired Workbench. I use WB 3.0. Follow the prompts. And there you go ... ALL DONE Remove the Install disk and reboot. Then check HDToolBox in your Tools drawer on the drive and make sure all your partitions are OK. Finished. I can now remove the drive and use on any Amiga with an IDE 3.5" interface and a suitable ROM. Easy peasy !! Graham goes back into store.

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Last updated 5th September 2021

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