Amiga Salvage Operation
While I was in college, I ordered a 1GB SCSI hard drive for my Amiga 3000 to augment the 105MB drive that came with it and was perpetually almost-full. The price was fairly reasonable and the seller mentioned that it came in an external enclosure. When it arrived, it turned out to be a 5.25" full-height drive; the enclosure contained its own power supply and was half the size of the Amiga itself. Based on the label stuck to the back, it was previously part of an Avid system and held a 3GB drive. It became my bulk-storage drive, holding my MOD collection (70MB packed down to 40MB with XFD) and backups.
I never copied all my files off of it after moving to my first PC back in 2000. Copying 80MB worth of data via 720KB floppy was not an appealing prospect so I kept putting it off for later. For nearly a decade, that later never came.
Having suffered a few PC hardware failures over the years-hard drives failing and memory going bad-I knew it was only a matter of time before the Amiga or the external drive died and took a big chunk of my personal history with it. For the most part, though, they were out of sight and out of mind. They sat in the floor of my bedroom closet in Los Angeles for a number of years, moved with me to Austin, and sat in the floor of my bedroom closet there for several more years.
A few years ago, I pulled the Amiga out of the closet, vacuumed off the dust that had accumulated, and set it up to have another go. The internal drive had seized up in the intervening years and the Amiga wouldn't boot from the external drive. I had to boot from the Workbench 2.04 floppy disk, redirect assignments to the system backup on the external drive, and run the startup sequence to get everything running. The keyboard didn't work particularly well, either, with a few keys requiring extra pressure to register a keystroke (N and spacebar in particular). Everything seemed to be intact, but I didn't have much time to deal with it then so I broke it down and put it back in the closet for later.
This past Friday night-over 20 years since I first got the Amiga and almost 10 since I last used it regularly-was that later. I had a nagging notion over the past week that the Amiga might not have much time left so I set it up again when I got home from work.
Since I would be using a 720KB floppy to transfer files, I needed a PC with a floppy drive. My current desktop computer (ULTRAKEN-3) and both laptops (ULTRAKEN-M-2 and ULTRAKEN-M-3) lack floppy drives so I set up my previous desktop computer (ULTRAKEN-2). I hadn't booted it in half a year so it had a lot of software updates to catch up on.
The Amiga turned out to be in exactly the same condition as last time. The keyboard was still flaky so I had to type harder than I'm used to. The display was a bit jittery at first but settled down after couple minutes; I never could get the monitor to line up the pixels right, though, so text was sometimes hard to read. I also had to rediscover a few steps needed to get Workbench running from the external drive. Once everything was up, I formatted a 720KB PC-compatible floppy to start transferring.
The first order of business was to rescue the irreplaceable files like artwork, programming projects, and saved email. Fortunately, there wasn't as much of that as I had feared. I packed loose files with LHA (LZX in the case of email), saving them temporarily to RAMdisk before copying them to floppy for transfer. Things started well but it wasn't long before my troubles began.
The floppy seemed to develop errors very quickly, and I ended up having to format it several times after each transfer. The disk itself is at least 10 years old and probably more like 15, but I suspect the real culprit is the Amiga's 20-year-old internal floppy drive. I spotted a fair amount of dust in there and the mechanical components may be having trouble keeping the disk in place well enough to write to it reliably. I expect it to simply stop working altogether before too long. At that point, I won't even be able to boot the system any more unless I can find a way to boot from the external drive. (It most likely needs to be set to a different SCSI ID; it's currently set to 5.)
The experience made it clear that copying 40MB+ of compressed MOD files via 720KB floppy was simply not going to happen. It would have been a time-consuming ordeal even if the drive were 100% reliable-on the order of 60 transfers-but with the drive figuratively unraveling before my eyes it would have been virtually impossible.
I looked at a few alternatives, including PC SCSI host adapters and null-modem cables, but the best (and cheapest) option seems to be re-downloading all the MODs from the Internet. Finding them is a challenge because my file names often don't match those used by the archive sites, but actually downloading them once I find them is fast and easy.
This ended up being an even bigger hassle than I expected, but I was able to copy everything I cared about to safety. In particular, found some interesting artwork in there that I had forgotten about, and I'll post a few items soon.