Hi,
> 1. An A1000 will only boot Kickstart from the internal drive, and as far as I know, the 1.x Kickstarts will only boot Workbench (or anything else) from the internal drive. 3.x (and possibly 2.x) will check all floppy drives for bootable disks
The advantage of the A1000 is it could use different Kickstarts and special ones like the "United Forces Antivirus" short UFO 1.3 or the "Level 42" Kickstart 1.2. Both these Kickstarts are able to boot the Workbench or a game from an external drive.
I think the "ROM Kernel Reference Manual -- Hardware" is a good place to find something about the communication of the Amiga with the disk drives.
Generally I would say that it is much easier to take a LapLink-cable and an older PC (Pentium I with Wind#*?& 95) and use the PC as an external non-autobooting harddrive using the "PC2Am" software that could be found at Aminet:
http://de5.aminet.net/comm/misc/PC2Am308.lhaWorks quite good with my A500+ and an old 486DX2/66 PC.
Noster
