Video: AROS 68K Booting

[Heiroglyph]

Also I believe that All Amiga's apart from some early ones can actually support 1MB ROMs...

I think I'm out of luck with a 4000T.  If I remember correctly, these are extremely hard to upgrade to 1MB.  The extra lines aren't anywhere near the ROM chips.

I do have a hard drive and Deneb with plenty of flash so it's not a big loss.

[Heiroglyph]

Why not? Look at the x86 bios, I can't think of any new features since the days of the 386, at most it supports new hardware, which is not an issue with classic amiga models. All new features can be implemented in the AROS. There might be some small issues, like having to create a boot partition in big hard disks or hard disks with newer filesystems, but having modern/free software makes it worth it.

But Kickstart is way more than just the BIOS, it's also the core of the OS.

Personally I'd like to boot directly into my RTG screen without having to screw with flickerfixers or ancient monitors and you can't do that unless Kickstart includes RTG.

[Heiroglyph]

Every user that has ever had trouble either finding a bootable Amiga floppy or getting that one extra library onto their 060 or A4000T would love to boot from CD or USB.

Those show up here at least once a week.

How about recovery disk/tool CD that can be legally downloaded from the net and burned on any computer in case your system drive is hosed?

Also, I would have loved to install OS3.9 cleanly without having to install 3.1 plus a bunch of freeware BS just to get the 3.9 install started.

The recovery floppy is a joke even if you do have a high density floppy and does you no good if you only have a blank, non-working Amiga.

[Heiroglyph]

The theory behind the Emergency disk is sound.  What do you mean?

It is in theory, but in execution it fails.

If you have no working Amiga, the CD is just short of useless.  You need 3.1 floppies that haven't gone bad plus access to the internet on a PC to get a CD Driver for 3.1

If you do have another working Amiga, especially if you need an RTG driver, the emergency floppy maker isn't selective enough with what it copies to the floppy and it quickly runs out of disk space even with a high-density drive.

If you don't install RTG software or know ahead of time to set it to an interlaced mode using OS3.1, the default screenmode isn't tall enough for the screenmode prefs app to allow you to change resolutions.  The Accept/Try buttons are far off the screen so you can't accept the change.

The install was so painful that I can't imagine they ever did a real-world install during testing.  If they tested at all.

At least on the Toaster/Flyer install we included a floppy with a CD filesystem to bootstrap the install from CD.

Not having a minimal boot floppy included with the OS3.9 CD was a terrible oversight.

Also, every Amiga owner should take advantage of the way AmigaOS works, and simply copy their System partition to another hard drive or CD/DVD for backup.

That's great assuming you have a working system at some point, but AmigaOS won't get you there on its own without a stack of shareware floppies on hand.

[Heiroglyph]

I know what you mean about the screenmodes, they screwed that up for sure.

But isn't the theory of the Emergency Disk this:  You create the disk from the 3.9 Installer when your system is running.  Then when you boot from the Emergency Disk it mounts cd0: and makes some assigns and stuff so you can install 3.9 over an empty partition?  I mean, isn't the only time you will need 3.1 is if you lose your Emergency Disk floppy?

You're right of course, but again in practice it is failing.

Once you've installed your system, the app that creates the floppy doesn't pay attention to what is needed and what just happens to be in envarc, etc.

The process fails with a disk full error and you have no way to make the floppy except by hand.