Sun 10 Feb 2008
Today I began working on my Amiga 500 again. Yesterday I gave the motherboard a proper wash with hot water and soap because I suspect the previous owner was a smoker and the motherboard was very dirty. I let the motherboard rest next to a heater during the night and it was completely dry in the morning, and in a very good looking condition (like new). The A500 shell was also dirty but in overall good condition. It was only yellowed on its side so after a hot bath for the case it looked great, I also swapped out the keyboard for an old one I had cleaned before, see for yourself:
Its actually empty, do not believe me?
Check it out:
So then I tried to boot my GVP HD8 external SCSI hard drive with 4 MB fast memory which did not boot, which was really strange since it worked last time. Turns out I had chopped offthe SCSI cable which had an external slave HD and a CD-ROM connected to it. In SCSI world devices need to have an ID and the last device need to be terminated. Now the internal HD had an ID but it was not terminated so the Amiga refused to boot. I thought a quick jumper setting would terminate the drive but it turned out the drive used resistors instead which the drive naturally lacked so I could not run the drive because I also lacked external 50 pin terminators. That’s what you get for not being a SCSI nerd.
Anyway then I came up with an ingenious idea, why not format the slave drive as the new main drive, it was a whopping 850 MB large and very quiet to, and best of all you could terminate the drive with a jumper. As the drive already was formatted with FFS I just wanted to reformat it and partition it a bit different, like for example to have a system partition (named Workbench: naturally) and a work partition (named Work: naturally) instead of having just one large slice of 850 gigantic megabytes (named {hd1} Gamez unt stuff:). But no matter what I tried HDtoolbox could not find my hard drive even though it showed up on the desktop which lead me to invest the matter further on the Internet. Turns out there is a solution to the problem but my time where up so I have to look into it next weekend.
