Amiga 500, Kickstart 1.3, Workbench 1.3.3, SupraDrive 500XP and the ZuluSCSI

I'm 100% sure this isn't the best way to do this, but this way I got it done. I got the ZuluSCSI from Amigastore.eu with the idea that if I get it from them, it will work with the Amiga without any firmware tinkering first. Don't know if it would've needed anything like that bought from somewhere else, but I just wanted to be sure.

The ZuluSCSI needs to be powered by the berg connector (the same as in floppy drives) when it's used with SupraDrive 500XP. In most cases it doesn't need the extra power but in this case it does.

I just took it from the power cord that is in the SupraDrive, there would've probably been a more pretty way to do it but I did it my way.

Then I made some "quick and dirty" pieces to mount the ZuluSCSI. It will be on Thingiverse by the name "ZuluSCSI mounts for SupraDrive 500XP" when I get there.

Then it was time for the software. I had already made dh0.hda and dh1.hda images with WinUAE and installed some basics in them, just like I saw done in some YouTube video. Naturally things didn't go just like that even if the .hda's worked fine on WinUAE. I first booted from a floppy, and it took ages while the Zulu did it stuff and flashed the HD led before the Amiga finally booted from the floppy. INFO command didn't show any hard drives. "What a surprise", I thought. Next I took the Supra floppies (SupraBoot and SupraTools) which I have used already back in the day, and things started to progress. At this point I have to say that I tried 1.10c and 3.0c versions of the Supra stuff, but had problems with those so the 3.8b is what I used to get a successfull result. All of those are available online, for example at https://amiga.resource.cx/exp/supra500xp.

I booted the Amiga from the SupraBoot floppy, and quite soon it asked if it should format (or what ever it offered to do, not quite sure any more) the drive(s) as there is some problem with tehem. Answered no, because I haven't checked the partitioning yet.

The SupraTools disk has this SupraHDTools program, ran it. After a while it had found something.

And there it was, the whole capacity of my sd card divided in to two partitions. The partitions of course weren't there, this was just a suggestion by the software. Here I also realized my two .HDA images obviously weren't noticed at all as there wouldn't have been the whole capacity available.

Then I did some trial and errors, but finally I got it done and this is how it went:

The things marked red are what I changed, the volume name (blue) I left alone as it could be easily changed later. As you can see, I'm quite modest with the partition sizes. That's because I will not be needing more (I have other Amigas that are "modernized"). The thing that was giving me the most problem (a constant whining of DH1 not having formatted because it's not a DOS drive or something like that) and had me ?!?!?!?1+11 for a while is the one marked in yellow. Only when I thought I should make the partitions next to each other, things got rolling.

Now, you can see the DH1 goes from 477121 to 495871, and the size of "that" is 18750 (495871-477121). Then I thought I'd try to set the DH1 start from 9378 (=right after DH0) and stretch up to 28128 (that is 9378 plus the size (18750) of DH1), like this:

Then clicked on that "Write RDB", quit the software, restarted the computer and booted again from the SupraBoot floppy. Got this screen which looked like something has happened:

Obviously there's a hard drive now, and it asked if I wanted to have the script install WorkBench. Declined this time as I wanted to see how it looks with INFO. And indeed it looked just as it should, DH0: 150mb and DH1: 300mb, yikes! Now I could've rebooted from the SupraBoot floppy and let it install the WB (offering 1.3 and 2.03, don't know if it would've asked for WB & Extras floppies, probably) but I decided to copy manually the WB and Extras -floppies (and it was just a matter of copying everything from the floppies to the HD) I wanted to use to the hard drive, and after removing the floppies I restarted the computer and it booted from the HD like always.

So, that's the way I got it done. Placing the SD card back to the PC Windows only says that the card needs to be formatted before it can be used, so no possibility the transfer anything. Don't know if it could be accessed via WinUAE, wasn't able to get it done at least with my 2 minutes of trying. I don't see this as a very big problem as with the SupraDrive 500XP you won't be accessing the card anyway that easily. And as for me, I couldn't care less. I want to transfer my stuff with serial cable and/or ADF's anyway, like restoring HD backups from 60 QuarterBack .ADF "floppies" :-)

So. This way i got it done, hope this is of help to someone one day.

porakone@hotmail.com


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