Well after a few hours of trying to get it to boot from the HDD and then figuring out you don't need the 4.1 disc just 4.1.1 and doing a fresh install with it. It's booting :-)
Took two different howtos and reading the PegII manual a couple of times, in the end I just kept decreasing the boot partition in size until it would boot from it. Anything under 25MB works, tried to make it smaller but this is painful using media toolbox. However doesn't matter it's booting and I'm using a 250GB HDD ;-)
First impressions is that 4.1 update 6 is gorgeous, right down to the mouse pointer. It's very quick and snappy. The screen looks very crisp and unlike 4.1 it's starting to look like a modern OS. Without update 1 or higher I was also getting graphic corruption, as soon as update 1 went on wow, big change.
The new boot screen from update 3 or 4 onwards looks 100% better, more now than 80's/90's.
Navigating around is just like AmigaOS 3.9. Actually it's pretty close to my AmigsOS 3.9 setup on my A1200, right down to my OS4.1 theme ;-)
It's very stable, a lot more stable than 3.9. Also the user-startup/startup-sequence only has a few lines compared to all the patches I need to run under 3.9.
However when you start digging there are similar/same issues as 3.9. Try extracting multiple files in Diropus i.e. WHDLoad packs and navigation slows to a crawl, just sit back and watch the Diropus progress bar. Multitasking at this point is a no go ;-)
However other than the above I could switch screens fine, I think this comes back to the out dated filesystems in use.
MiniGL/Warp works really well and the demos that come with it run with no issues and surprisingly quick. However I downloaded openarena from os4depot and even at 640x480 there is a hint of lag. Plus the jaggies argh terrible.
The ATI 9200 I know is a far more capable card than that. Doesn't really bode well but will post again when I try some more games.
Will try Quake1 and Quake2 next, will be interesting to see as on my A1200 I can play both at 640x480 with warp3d/minigl at very playable speeds (and no jaggies) on a Voodoo 5 5500.
Ghouls and Ghosts remix, even in the tiny default screen it feels laggy. Nothing really complicated about it, tried to run at full screen same performance. Something not right there.
Runinuae, with all the updates installed this makes playing WHDLoad games a breeze, however it goes to a WB3.1 and when you quit out of the WHDLoad game it dumps you back in the WB3.1 not exiting right back to OS4. Of course after some further reading I have to hit a combination of keys to exit WB3.1.
Will be testing igame next as browsing through 1000 odd folders is still just as painful as 3.9.
Web browsing, ibrowse works great very quick. Of course as it's the same version as 3.9 it still can't render some pages correctly. But it works except for the same issue I had with java under 3.9 with time outs etc.
OWB pages look better and seems to be snappy performance wise.
Timberwolf, crashes and the loading bar gets stuck at 25%ish.
Will keep playing around with it :-)