Adding SCSI2SD to AMPRO Little Board plus

I used a scsi2sd card with a 256MB sd card.

This took me a bit longer than I expected because I didn’t read the instructions.  CP/M needs to be configured to have some hard disk buffer space, otherwise the format fails mysteriously.  I changed it from 60k to 56k.  That allows room for the maximum 88MB of total disk storage.

The hformat program allowed for different controllers but after some experimenting I found success with the Seagate ST-225N hard disk. 

+-----

Form                 5.25"/HH              Cylinders     615|     |     |

Capacity form/unform    21/   25 MB        Heads           4|     |     |

Seek time   / track  65.0/20.0 ms          Sector/track   17|     |     |

Controller           SCSI1 SINGLE-ENDED    Precompensation

Cache/Buffer               KB              Landing Zone      670

Data transfer rate          MB/S int       Bytes/Sector      512

                      1.500 MB/S ext ASYNC

I set up sd2scsi with 7 drives each with 615 x 4 x 17 = 41820 sectors of 512 bytes.

I used hinit (with burst mode) to set up 2 partitions on drive 0 and drive 1:

• 8192k
• 8192k

This needs to be done on every boot (really? yes) but an alias can be created:

alias

HINIT YD010 AF8192 AG8192, YD110 AF8192 AG8192,.

hardinit

then another alias that does this and swaps the drives over:

alias

HARDINIT; SWAP AF BG CH DI; STARTUP

HSTART

Startup can contain whatever is wanted, eg a menu program.

HSTART can be run on boot by adding at item 5 in the config program.

Copy the system track from the boot floppy to the hard disk using SYSGEN (watch out for the letter swapping).

Less than obvious (it’s in a separate section of the hard disk software manual right at the end) are instructions for autostart, noting HGEN in particular.:

When the system starts, it looks for a boot floppy. If it finds it, then it will boot from it.  If it doesn’t find it, in about 10 seconds it will boot from the first hard disk partition.  For some reason it keeps looking for a disk in the first floppy disk drive.  If you give it one it stops but does nothing with the disk.