UPDATE: FOUND the cause, but have NO idea WHY .. A new issue I have never seen..

[Pat the Cat]

Am a little suspicious that the files are complete enough to load Workbench, but the icons don't operate.

How about shell?

And the first rule of having a good booting system - copy it somewhere with the clone option and stash it safe.

It could be malware, it could be a glitched file (one file gone bad can mean a validation issue).

[Pat the Cat]

I'd want to try a different drive. It has surely rotated millions of times since it was built.

And a more recent revision of the WD scsi controller (CBM tended to fit early buggy version 3 or 4, 8 is preferable).

You can get pin compatible replacement for that.

With Direct scsi the drive capacity shouldn't be a problem.

[Pat the Cat]

Link is British but vendor is American, shop around obviously.

https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/153110403489?hash=item23a61759a1:g:SEgAAOSwNGhZ3m02

[Pat the Cat]

Bear in mind you have a scsi,device in the ROMs - and the 3.2 scsi.device in the Kickstart.

You can type "version scsi.device" to find out if it's V37 (WB 2 era) or V47 (I think that's right for 3.2).

[Pat the Cat]

... Nah. The wrong version wouldn't boot at all.

I still reckon it's a buggy version 3 controller chip causing the issue.

On smaller (<128MB) drives nobody noticed, but when bigger drives arrived, people started having these sort of problems.

Even with V7 ROMs, there's a size limitation.

2.20 * Why does HDToolBox limit partitions on the A2091/A590 to 4 GB?

This happens because even the latest version 7.0 ROM for the A2091/A590 controller does not support partitions greater than 4GB.

HDToolBox will automatically limit the allocable drive capacity to 4GB. This is to protect users who may not have a file system supporting "SCSI Direct Transfer", or who don't know how to enable  this SCSI Direct option with the FastFileSystem.

However, if you feel confident that you have both, then you can override this protection by setting "LIMIT_4GBYTE=OFF" in the HDToolBox's Tool Types. Another option is to purchase the latest version of the third-party GuruROM upgrade for the A2091/A590.

From;-
http://aminet.net/docs/help/AmigaOS_3.2-FAQ.txt

[Pat the Cat]

One other thing it could be - from (I think 2.1) onwards, you had to add a clone directive to a copy command to preserve all the flags (like, file executable, editable, deletable, archived).

In old shell;-

COPY ALL DH0:/ Backuip:/Latestworkbench

Became

COPY DH0:/ BackupL/Latestworkbench CLONE

That could also a a factor here.

https://wiki.amigaos.net/wiki/AmigaOS_Manual:_AmigaDOS_Command_Reference#COPY   <It's V4 but accurate for example

[Pat the Cat]

One other thing it could be - from (I think 2.1) onwards, you had to add a clone directive to a copy command to preserve all the flags (like, file executable, editable, deletable, archived).

In old shell;-

COPY ALL DH0:/ Backuip:/Latestworkbench

Became

COPY DH0:/ BackupL/Latestworkbench CLONE

That could also a a factor here.

https://wiki.amigaos.net/wiki/AmigaOS_Manual:_AmigaDOS_Command_Reference#COPY   <It's V4 but accurate for example

That should be automatic.   But remember, this also happens with WB copy drag and drop, DOPUS and a couple other tools I tried and of course shell copy.

I forgot the ALL from the 2nd example.

And no, I didn't find it automatic, I wondered why none of my Workbench backup programs would execute without the CLONE switch.