Amiga.org
Amiga computer related discussion => Amiga Software Issues and Discussion => Topic started by: James1095 on December 19, 2016, 07:58:30 PM
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I repaired an Amiga 2000 for someone but the ancient 5.25" hard drive was in bad shape and deteriorated further to the point that I'm unable to recover anything useful from it. This machine has a Commodore 68030 accelerator card and a 2901(?) SCSI card in it and I think the ROM is Kickstart 2.0 but I'd have to check for sure. Does anyone have a hard drive image with Workbench and whatnot that I could write to another drive and pop it in this thing without having to go through the whole setup process and install everything individually? I have a few assorted SCSI drives I can use, ranging from 50MB to 72GB. The drive that died was 60MB and had workbench, a tracker with a bunch of MOD files and looked like a few games and utilities from way back when this thing was in use.
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FYI you're asking for copyrighted software. Anyone posting a link to such an image in this forum will probably get smacked down by the copyright police. Not to say that such things don't exist, but just doing a fresh install on such a system is probably faster than downloading an image (and finding some way of copying it over) anyway, lol. ;)
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Well I already have the software, or had it until the bits rotted away on the drive. I even have a set of original Workbench floppies, I was just hoping to save the effort of going through the whole setup process, I'm not looking for a bunch of sketchy pirated stuff. Connecting the drive to my PC and imaging or mounting it in WinUAE is trivial, I already did that with the drive from my A3000 but that install is a bit of a mess too.
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Well I already have the software, or had it until the bits rotted away on the drive. I even have a set of original Workbench floppies, I was just hoping to save the effort of going through the whole setup process, I'm not looking for a bunch of sketchy pirated stuff. Connecting the drive to my PC and imaging or mounting it in WinUAE is trivial, I already did that with the drive from my A3000 but that install is a bit of a mess too.
Yes, I'd tend to agree with you that concerns over the copyright issues are a bit overwrought.
As the system had a functional install, all you are talking about is recovery media.
Microsoft allows the distribution of recent versions of Windows, since that software requires registration in order for it to continue to function.
Is it our fault that no comparable mechanism was built into Workbench/AmigaOS to guarantee the honesty of Amiga users?
Further, as all Amigas came with Workbench, the only legitimate objection would be to providing a newer version than that which was shipped with the machine.
And finally, while I personally would have no problem buying new media from either Hyperion or Cloanto, their claims to the rights to this intellectual property are backed up by dubious transfers of the IP long after the originating company has expired.
Frankly, if I could ascertain what version was originally installed on the machine you have, I would have no legal qualms about helping you restore it.
But I wouldn't offer to do it on a forum like this, because as the above answer clearly indicates, some people are far too tightly wrapped when it comes to this matter.
BTW - I wouldn't have a problem helping a PPC Mac user reinstall their OS either.
Again, every Mac sold was sold with a copy of MacOS installed.
Our market is NOT like the PC market, where equipment could be bought without the OS.
Only the new hardware we have created ourselves has that issue.
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Well I pulled one of the drives out of the A3000 since I plan to use a bigger drive in that anyway and cleaned it off, it works just fine in the A2000 but I couldn't figure out how to install Workbench, I must be missing the disk with the installer. At any rate the machine worked fine and I had fixed all the hardware issues - cleaned up the battery damage, replaced the CPU socket, replaced the ancient 5.25" hard drive, fixed the blown mouse fuse, verified that it boots fine off floppies and plays games. Not wanting to sit on it any longer I gave it back to the owner and figured he can work on the software side if he wants.
As much as I love the Amiga, I've been spoiled by modern PCs in this respect. Pop in a CD/DVD, boot up the OS, partition/format/install, it's so painless in comparison. On the other hand, I still remember having to load Debug and use g=c800:5 on the old PC/XT boxes to do a low level format on the MFM drive, I don't miss that.
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Well I pulled one of the drives out of the A3000 since I plan to use a bigger drive in that anyway and cleaned it off, it works just fine in the A2000 but I couldn't figure out how to install Workbench, I must be missing the disk with the installer. At any rate the machine worked fine and I had fixed all the hardware issues - cleaned up the battery damage, replaced the CPU socket, replaced the ancient 5.25" hard drive, fixed the blown mouse fuse, verified that it boots fine off floppies and plays games. Not wanting to sit on it any longer I gave it back to the owner and figured he can work on the software side if he wants.
As much as I love the Amiga, I've been spoiled by modern PCs in this respect. Pop in a CD/DVD, boot up the OS, partition/format/install, it's so painless in comparison. On the other hand, I still remember having to load Debug and use g=c800:5 on the old PC/XT boxes to do a low level format on the MFM drive, I don't miss that.
To be fair, normally it's not vastly different to modern day OS installations.
Pop in a floppy disk (if you can find it), boot up the OS, partition/format/install.