The Emergency Disk II for AmigaOS 3.9

[PanterHZ]

Amiga911 Maker 1.59 is planned to be released in the beginning of 2014, and one of the new features is the possibility to create an Emergency Disk II floppy for AmigaOS 3.9. I have now decided to release two ready-made versions of this disk before the new version of Amiga911 Maker is available.

Emergency Disk II is an enhanced version of the original AmigaOS 3.9 Emergency Disk. It uses the same type of technology as the Amiga911 boot disk, where lzx compression is used in order to fit more stuff on it. The Emergency Disk II also provides some alternative methods for installing AmigaOS 3.9 as well.
In addition to the standard method of using the original CD with a CD-ROM drive, you can make a AmigaOS 3.9 USB pendrive or a Compact Flash card to be used with a CF-PCMCIA adapter. Another method is using an AmigaOS 3.9 ISO image which can be present on any drive that gets mounted on startup. If you still insist on installing from the original CD, you can also use an external USB CD-ROM drive. The USB methods requires that the Poseidon stack is included on the disk, and of course that a supported USB card is installed in your Amiga.

The target Amigas for both disks are A600 and/or A1200, but they should also work with other Amiga models as well. The absolute minimum requirements are a 68020 processor and 6MB RAM. The main difference between the two disks, is that one of them includes a minimal version of the Poseidon USB stack. Because of legal reasons, the disks are missing some system files since they are still under copyright. This means that the disks must be activated by importing the missing files before they can be fully used, this can be done by using the included "Activate E-Disk-II" tool.

For more information, go to: http://amiga911maker.site11.com

I also made a quick video which shows one of the disks in action:


[youtube]QA_NQCPp5zY[/youtube]

[PanterHZ]

Thanks for the feedback

Yes Amiga911 Maker 1.59 will have support for importing Picasso96, Mediator and Poseidon files to Emergency Disk II projects. But I see that you have a Spider USB card, this means that booting from a AmigaOS 3.9 USB device might not be possible. The problem is that as far as I know, the Mediator board must be activated before Poseidon is started, and the way the Mediator is activated, is by running the Picasso96 monitor driver. A possible workaround might be trying to start the driver right before Poseidon in the Startup-Sequence, but I can't test this since I don't have a Spider USB card (yet).

Another thing I can mention, is that it might be a good idea to check the tooltypes of the Picasso96 monitor driver present on the Emergency Disk. If there is a "SETTINGSFILE=SYS: Devs/Picasso96Settings" line, it should really be changed to "SETTINGSFILE=Devs: Picasso96Settings". Otherwise the system will look for the Picasso96Settings file on the AmigaOS 3.9 CD, where it obviously can't be found (have in mind that I inserted a space after the colons here to avoid any smileys).

The above goes for both my Emergency Disk and the original one, and it might actually be the reason for your Workbench problems.

[PanterHZ]

"SETTINGSFILE=EMERGENCY-DISK : DEVS/Picasso96" should also work fine as long as you haven't renamed the disk, and yes parenthesis is used for commenting out options.

Another thing you can try is to check if everything required is present on your disk. For your setup, the following must be included:

Libs/Picasso96/
Prefs/Env-Archive/Picasso96/
Devs/Picasso96Settings

Prefs/Env-Archive/Mediator/
Libs/pci.library

All that ends in a slash are directories, and the files in them must of course be present on the Emergency Disk.

As for making a customized AmigaOS 3.9 CD, I will suggest that you are careful with this since it may not work properly in the future if you do any hardware changes on your Amiga. But on the other hand, as long as you still have the original CD, it shouldn't be a problem.

[PanterHZ]

For those who are interested, version 1a of the disks has now been released, and here are some info about the new changes:

* Now there is a third "Lite" variant of the Emergency Disk II floppy available, it allows the user to include even more of the stuff that he/she prefers since the disk will be just a little over 50% full after activation.

* Although the minimum amount of RAM required for using the Emergency Disk II is set to be 6MB, you can actually get it to work with less since the disk contains some workarounds that may free up some memory. This functionality has now been improved, and in low-mem situations it will try to prevent the Workbench from having any background images, and AmiDock might be forced to use a more minimalistic config.

* Fixed a problem where ToolsDaemon could fail to load because the Workbench screen has not yet been opened.

* The "Activate E-Disk-II" tool is now included directly on the Emergency Disk II floppies. After activation you will have to manually delete the file in order to free up some disk space.

* DiskImage is no longer included on the Emergency Disks since ImageMount does a similar job and is also smaller in size.

[PanterHZ]

Yes it was my plans of installing AmigaOS 3.9 on my A600 that got me going with this project in the first place

BTW. The sound in my video has now been replaced, and it should now be available in all countries.