Expert: Gregory Donner - 5/14/2011

Question
QUESTION: I have a newly aquired Amiga 3000 and I'd like to replace its current (old) 40 mb hard scsi drive with a comparatively new 2.1 gig seagate hard drive... I'm having difficulty. The information on how exactly to do this, step by step, is quite spotty. I've spent about 4 weeks trying to cobble together enough info to do it myself but continue to fail. (I'm no dunce, I do HD's for macs, PC's and such now but I have no frame of reference for this, back in the day I only had an Amiga 500 without HD and never could afford the A2000,3000 or 4000.)

Is there a step by step tutorial you've done or are aware of which could keep me from completely pulling my hair out???!

I've done the HDtools, formatting, partitioning but beyond that I fail. When it gets past renaming it WB_2.x and getting the "kickstart" image into devs folder things just seem to go wonky or I'm missing info which isn't posted on forums. It's probably totally simple and I'm just not seeing the forest for the trees. IDK.

Thanks,

James Ruggles

ANSWER: Hi James,

Ah--it sounds like you have a rare, and early version of the Amiga 3000, one that uses files to boot from (i.e. acting like a hardware ROM/BIOS), instead of the actual hardware chip. I suspect that's what's causing the problem, because it was basically a pre-production Amiga 3000 shipped to early buyers in a special deal in its early days. You'll need to install a hardware Kickstart 3.1 ROM chip in it (kits available from the following stores listed below). An Amiga with a Kickstart 3.1 ROM chip in it can run either the OS 3.5 or 3.9 software, but both come on a CD, hence the need for a CD-ROM drive connected and working with your 3000.

amibay.com, amigakit.com, eBay.com or softhut.com

One of these should have the hardware ROM you need (the actual chip HAS to be specific to your 3000--in other words, a 3.1 Kickstart CHIP for an Amiga 4000 or Amiga 1200 won't work in your 3000--make sure the company knows this when you buy it). You may need to shop around to see who has what you need. Plus, you'll need either the 3.1 software, or the 3.5 or 3.9 software (3.1 comes on floppy disks, so that may be your best option if you don't have a CD-ROM drive connected to your Amiga 3000.)

If you're interested in what 3.9 offers, see this page:

http://www.gregdonner.org/os39review/os39review.html

I hope this helps!

Greg

---------- FOLLOW-UP ----------

QUESTION: Ok, that possibility was contemplated (eventually)... To that end, I did purchase A3000 40.68 3.1 Rom's on ebay a week or so ago but have not purchased the disks yet. (I put the two Rom's in the motherboard and they are functional, I'm getting the animated disk load screen, so that's fine.)

So, are you saying that if I had these disks that the hard drive setup would be fairly simple or at least not as difficult as this current config is? Is there anything else you believe I should know about the 3.1 HD setup proceedure?

Thanks,

James

Answer
Hi James,

Ah, good--then yes, you're all set to install 3.1 when the disks arrive. HDToolBox should work properly after the 3.1 install, seeing as it fixes a massive amount of stuff over the 2.x Kickstart file you were booting from previously. There's nothing else that comes to mind; your hard drive is less than 4GB, so no problem there.

I hope this helps!

Greg