my dry run of adding IDE CDROM to A2000 with TF536

[part12studios]

yea to be fair about scsi the card i had appeared to be non working so my attempt was obviously unsuccessful. even without the CF card installed wb still couldn't see it as a scsi.device. I will keep an eye out for the oktagon but honestly if i get the IDE CDROM or Zip drive working that's great..

I had parent teacher stuff tonight so my time to get IDE drivers installed was gone, but i DID pull wire up everything and boot up and nothing blew up! With CDROM connected and CF connected the CF still booted so i didn't botch the connections..

I think the end i may have to use my DF1: slot for my zip drive and the 5.25" bay will be for my HDD for the PAR card.. I may give the drivers a try in the morning and report back if I can see it.

Feeling optimistic!

[part12studios]

and yea about the CF card alternative that's great. the main reason keeping cd alive is just to access data off old disks, but that's certainly not super common.. but yea i'm just mostly seeing if it works at all.. and then decide what the best second ide device will be. I'm partial to exploring zip as have all other systems of mine with zip in some form or another be internal or external. i have an external floppy drive so i can keep that around when i need to read real floppies for any reason.. and like i was saying (unfortunately) i need to keep the 5.25" bay open for an HDD for the Personal Animation Recorder which itself (surprisingly) isn't designed to mount the HHD on the card itself like scsi cards do.

[matt020]

Does your particular TF536 have IDE buffers installed on the board?

[part12studios]

I will ask Alan and see. What was the significance of having buffers or not?

[terriblefire]

I will ask Alan and see. What was the significance of having buffers or not?

You cannot use an IDE cable longer than 2 inches without buffers. You certainly cannot use 2 drives without them.

TF536 + SCSI works fine if you have your system setup correctly. You need to make sure its not trying to use the fastram as a DMA target. Easiest way to do that is RTFM for BufMemType on your mountlist. I dont know if there is a way to write the bufmemtype into the partition table for automount. This is a software thing and i dont really understand AmigaOS in this area.

[part12studios]

ok yes it is buffered, confirmed

[part12studios]

and yes that's what i mean about it being kinda of a myth. everyone who says it's possible never seems to be someone who actually has it working for them Like i hear people say it's slow.. but no one seems to be able to demonstrate how slow that is.. I'm sure someone out there has done it but it doesn't seem like its anyone who makes the claim at that time of the statement. =D

[terriblefire]

Well I don’t own a A2000 scsi card. I have almost 50 Amigas already and cannot possibly have everything ever made.

My suggestion would be to disable the onboard ram on the scsi card and see what happens

[part12studios]

i had done that.. it had no ram in it and the jumpers were set to 0mb.. mind you this was a 2091.. and untested (no idea if it was good from seller) and the final straw for me was:

booting from floppy with no CF card installed making the system HDD-less.. a WB3.0 install disk with HD tools.. it still wouldn't see any scsi.device in the scan for devices.. i tried with an internal scsi hdd.. but also no hdd.. and a standard external scsi (terminated) zip drive. when i couldn't get it to even see that.. i had to call it. maybe prematurely but wasn't looking good.

[terriblefire]

i had done that.. it had no ram in it and the jumpers were set to 0mb.. mind you this was a 2091.. and untested (no idea if it was good from seller) and the final straw for me was:

booting from floppy with no CF card installed making the system HDD-less.. a WB3.0 install disk with HD tools.. it still wouldn't see any scsi.device in the scan for devices.. i tried with an internal scsi hdd.. but also no hdd.. and a standard external scsi (terminated) zip drive. when i couldn't get it to even see that.. i had to call it. maybe prematurely but wasn't looking good.

I looked for an A2091 on ebay but ended up buying postcard of Oban instead.