New Amiga owner - couple questions

[+thanatos]

As the title says, I have recently acquired an Amiga 4000 and a 3000 system. Only one monitor/keyboard/mouse with the set though.

 

Sadly the circumstances are because it was a friend who passed away recently. His sister would have just thrown it all out until she heard I was interested.

 

I have powered up the 4000 tonight, and it boots off the hard drive. Before I do anything, I was wondering if there was a good way to image it. I'm assuming it's the original hard drive. I'd rather not peruse through his personal stuff, but I also don't want to risk losing any important data on an old hard drive, he did do some programming on it back in the day. I won't power it back on again until I hear if there is something I should do to copy the data safely.

 

Also, if there is anything I should look into right away to make sure the hardware has been maintained correctly, that would be helpful too.

 

Here's a picture of it booted up. It went to this file management system, and I figured out how to close it out, and it went to the Amiga workbench after that. I am also worried that I didn't figure out a way to shut it down correctly, is that a thing on Amigas? (I just turned it off)

 

 

 

 

 

[eightbit]

First and foremost, I am really sorry for the loss of your friend

 

There are a few ways to back up the hard drive...and probably a few more that others will chime in on. It is most likely (or most definitely) a SCSI drive. If you have an older PC with a SCSI card you can image the drive, but that might prove to be difficult nowadays. You can get ahold of a SCSI2SD device and then connect them both together in the SCSI chain and copy the contents to an Amiga filesystem formatted microSD card. That would be the best solution I would think. Then you can take the resulting microSD card and image it on a PC for a permanent copy you can store on Dropbox or burn to a CD or something. The SCSI2SD device is only $60 and microSD cards of the size you will need (I am guessing under 4GB) are dirt cheap.

 

This is a heck of a machine by the way. I would have given a right nut for it....but not at the cost of losing a friend of course. Baby steps with it. You need to open it up and see what you are dealing with and especially make sure to yank out the battery inside (if it is the original and was not modified with a coin cell) before it ends your Amiga journey indefinitely.

 

Ohh, and yeah, I just turn it off as long as all programs are closed and no HDD activity is happening.

 

 

EDIT: Or wait. I might be mistaken. That HDD might be IDE. You have to open it and check. Take some pics and we can help you along with this Here is a good video on this machine:

 

Edited February 20, 2018 by eightbit

[+chue]

You'll probably want to take a look at removing/ replacing the batteries - they tend to eat motherboards. Example here: http://atariage.com/forums/topic/275275-damn-you-varta-ebay-auction-for-an-a3000/

[eightbit]

And the same goes with the A3000. Get the batteries out. Time is truly of the essence when it comes to this if these machines weren't maintained for some time. And, if you end up wanting to part with that A3000, please let me know. I have been hunting for one for the better part of the past decade.

[+thanatos]

I opened up both of them. The 4000 appears to have two IDE drives! The 3000 has one drive, I assume SCSI.

 

The 4000 has a coin cell on the board which looks fine. The battery in the 3000 did not look bad, a couple crystals on one end. (I understand the ancient NiCad thing, did the same work on my Neo-Geo MVS)

I still took it out, hopefully not breaking anything. It has 3 add on boards in it so it was a little tough to get to.

 

I took more pics of the internals of both, but I won't be able to add those until tomorrow. I have already stayed up later than I should have on a work night.

[eightbit]

The IDE drives should be a breeze to back up provided you have a computer with IDE onboard or via IDE controller card. Even though Windows will not see them, you should be able to mount them in WinUAE and then copy the contents to a PC folder (mount the drive and mount the folder as a drive in WinUAE) or just back up the whole drive using Linux and dd.

[+thanatos]

The 3000 also boots up, thankfully my rough battery removal last night didn't hurt anything (nor did the battery kill the machine!)

 

I only plugged in to the bottom video out. There are 2 other cards in this one, and I have no idea what they are. I can't see any text on them. Also, had no keyboard. The 4000 keyboard has a different plug. But I could move around the mouse fine and launched a couple programs and games from the hard drive.

 

 

 

 

 

 

[chiark]

So sorry for the loss of your friend

 

WinUAE can make an image of the attached drives : get it from WinUAE.net, attach your drives, run WinUAE then go into drives section. Select physical drive (needs admin permissions) and you can make and image file from there...

[+thanatos]

Bumping this 4+ year old thread (Wow, can't believe it's been that long)

 

Anyway, so I brought the 4000 to VCFMW in 2019, and a very helpful Amiga guy there checked it out and said it most definitely needed to be archived due to the stuff/code/configurations my friend had on there.  I think he said something to the affect of "this guy must have been a genius".   He told me his email address, but sadly I must have not gotten it right as my message bounced as invalid.

 

His suggestion was to connect the drives to a USB to IDE converter and then get the data with WinUAE.  But it turns out these drives are before LBA - which what the USB converters use.  They use the old CHS parameters.  

So these drives are still currently not saved, but thankfully still working for the moment.

Not sure if I should try them in a PC, I think the oldest usable one I have for this task is a P3 from around 2003, I don't know if that BIOS would have the CHS options to connect such a drive. 

 

Looking for other options, maybe a network card to put in it?  Or maybe even a serial transfer?  The biggest downside is I am not familiar with the OS at all. 

 

 

 

[+OLD CS1]

@thanatos get in touch with me and I can help you.

[Keatah]

6 hours ago, thanatos said:

Not sure if I should try them in a PC, I think the oldest usable one I have for this task is a P3 from around 2003, I don't know if that BIOS would have the CHS options to connect such a drive. 

If it has ISA slots. And most PIII boards do. It'll have CHS.