Stopwatch cursor issue in Workbench

[Matt_H]

Welcome back!

Did you used to have other peripherals hooked up? CD drive, etc.? If those are absent now, any startup software that was expecting them might be hanging.

Others mentioned booting from floppy—the fact that that works is a good sign. You can also hold down both mouse buttons early in the boot process to get to Early Startup Control. From there, you can boot with no startup sequence to get into a command Shell. Whether via shell or floppy, you’ll want to look at the startup-sequence and user-startup scripts, along with the WBStartup drawer. I suspect the issue is in one of those locations. It might also be something in Devs:DOSDrivers. Let us know which avenue you want to investigate first and we’ll talk you through.

[Matt_H]

Boot without startup-sequence, first <Assign Env: RAM:> to suppress Env requester and then <LoadWB> to launch the default Workbench which you then can check for problems.

(Minor edit to LoadWB command)

This is a good test because if you get the stuck busy pointer (the stopwatch) it tells us that the issue is with something in WBStartup.

The absence of additional floppy drives shouldn’t cause the issue you described *unless* there was a particular disk you always had inserted in one of them and the system is trying to find something on it. Ordinarily there should be a System Request window asking for the disk in question, so the fact that there isn’t one suggests to me that this is unlikely to be the issue.