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A1000 cannot access hard drive in A1060 Sidecar

A

A4000Bear

Experienced Member
Joined
Dec 30, 2010
Messages
111
Location
Taradale, VIC, Australia
About 10 years ago I was given an NOS A1060 Amiga Sidecar that had spent its entire life in a store display, never powered up. I had it in storage until recently as I did not have an A1000 to connect it to.

Now that I have an A1000, it is time to get them working together. The A1000 is a PAL version with the later version motherboard that does not have the daughterboard. The Sidecar has an 8-bit SCSI controller card with hard drive. There is also a VGA card.

Everything works fine except that I cannot access the hard drive from the Amiga. By following the instruction book, I can create an Amiga partition on the drive (this is done from the PC side using a special partitioning program). The next step is to mount it on the Amiga. This fails. According to the instruction book, after issuing a 'DJMOUNT' command in the CLI, there should be a series of error messages and requesters that need to be cancelled before proceeding. I get nothing. The Amiga just sits there, but eventually after a minute or so, the CLI prompt returns. Any futher actions also fail.

I have noticed the interface board in the sidecar has a lot of modifications done to it, several tracks cut and many jumper wires added. There are also quite a few resistors added. They are neatly done and could have been done in the factory. Does anyone know if these mods are normal? I have seen one pic of the board on a website that only has two jumper wires added.

Also, occasionally, the A1000 will hang while booting Workbench from the floppy, but only if the sidecar is attached. The sidecar does not hang.

Incidentally, I believe the A1000 itself is OK, as I tried an A590 in the slot and it works fine.

Any suggestions I can try?
 
Since my first message, I have tried a few more things.

The latest version of the Janus software. Still no go, however after issuing the 'DJMOUNT' command, it does give me a little more information "DJMOUNT: timed out waiting for JanusHandler". All other aspects of the Sidecar still function.

Different 68000 chips. No effect other than a 16MHz version suffers less hangs. A 68HC000 chip fails to work at all with the Sidecar attached.

I replaced all the 74HCT244 buffer chips in the Sidecar interface board that are used to interface the A1000. There were three different brands of these originally in the Sidecar. No difference, though the occasional hangs I got on some 68000s seem to have gone away.

Removal and re-installation of the added pull-up resistors on the 74HCT244 chips had no effect. Removal of the other jumper wires, and making the interface board like the one on that website failed totally.

I tried an A500 plugged into the Sidecar. It worked exactly the same as the A1000 did.

Looks like I'll have to give up any idea of getting the Amiga to access the Sidecar's hard drive. I have run out of ideas.

Any other ideas I can try?
Is there a circuit schematic for the Sidecar out there?
 
Can you do anything at all with the sidecar besides? Can you run any PC software on it currently? I was thinking that you had to run some sort of TSR/device driver for janus on the PC side for the janus stuff to work completely over on the Amiga side, but I could be mistaken.
 
Another thought... if you have a spare CGA or monochrome card have you tried that in the sidecar to see if it's actually booting up?
 
Yes, the Sidecar is fully functional. It boots normally. I can use the Amiga keyboard with it, and the PC screen appears on Workbench, so the Amiga and Sidecar are talking. I also tried a VGA card and it works too. The Sidecar also boots normally into DOS from the SCSI controller and hard drive I have added.

The one and only problem is that I cannot get the Amiga to see the Amiga partition in the hard drive.
I already have the instruction manual, which came with the Sidecar, which was still new in its original box!
 
You do have an Amiga partition on the hard disk then?

I wonder if it's a problem with the dual port RAM. If some features work and not others...
 
Yes, I successfully created the Amiga partition within MS-DOS, using the special Amiga partitioning program as per the instructions.

I guess the dual port RAM is one thing I could try. Maybe next weekend I could try replacing it.
 
Finally had success.

The main problem was that I was using software that came with an A2386 Bridgeboard. Even though the documentation and software itself clearly states it supports all Commodore bridgeboards and the Sidecar, I was never able to get the PC drive to be shared as an Amiga drive. Eventually I managed to find the actual Sidecar disks and used those successfully.

Incidentally, the sidecar address sector also has to be set to E0000 - EFFFF for the Sidecar hard drive to work as an Amiga drive. That was not mentioned in the instruction manual. These are dip switches 3&4 in the second bank of 4 switches. Both have to be 'off'.
 
Excellent! I'd say the sidecar is more valuable as a hard disk add-on than a PC, so that's good you got it working. :)
 
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