[comp.sys.amiga.hardware] A-Max II, A2091 or 3000, and external SCSI

gpotts@oregon.uoregon.edu (04/13/91)

Today I attempted, without success, to get an A-Max II equipped A3000 to 
recognize a Syquest removeable cartridge. After spending most of the 
afternoon at this project, I thought I'd give a report and see if there 
are any obvious things that I am doing wrong. I do not have a 3000 (I
was using a store demo machine) and had no A3000 or WB2.0 documentation
at hand, so in many ways I was flying blind and may well have made some
simple mistake.

The first problem was getting the 3000 to boot with a Syquest drive attached.
With a Syquest drive attached and powered up but without an Amiga formatted
cartridge installed, the 3000 refused to boot at all. I had to power down 
Syquest, then boot, then power up the Syquest. Once I had formatted a cart
under AmigaDOS, the 3000 would boot with the Syquest on as long as the 
formatted cart was in the drive an spun up.

As per the A-Max II instructions for the 2091 controller, I copied the file
"scsi.amhd" to the sys:devs directory (I  noticed that there was no
scsi.device there -- could this have been the problem? A-Max documentation
claims it needs to be there). Because there was no A-Max partition on the 
A3000's internal drive, I created a "dummy" mountlist entry as instructed
in the A-Max II documentation. This entry follows:

AMAXex:		device = scsi.device
		Unit = 0
		Flags = 0
		Surfaces = 0
		BlocksPerTrack = 0
		Reserved = 0
		Interleave = 0
		LowCyl = 0; HighCyl = 0
		Buffers = 0
		BufMemType = 0
#

From the Shell, I then mounted AMAXex:. I then attempted to run A-Max but
it would not get to the Mac disk with the flashing question mark -- the Mac
startup process just hung.

Hs anyone successfully used external SCSI devices under A-Max on an A3000 or
a 2091 equipped A2000 and, if so, could you tell me how?

Thanks.

--geoff
gpotts@oregon.uoregon.edu

collins@Alliant.COM (Phil Collins) (04/19/91)

  Yes I have the Amax working on the 3000 with a 210 Meg Quantum and syquest.
I even have a Mac back up program working just great. I will send you all the info I have,I took good notes as how I went about it.