Advice from a fellow A4000 owner....
A1200 ROMs are NOT compatable with A4000... The custom chipset is too different, and each ROM is written accordingly.
The IDE interface of the A4000 is not ATAPI compliant. There are drivers out there that will make a CDROM work, but I've never had satisfactory results with any of them (the best one is unregisterable, and gives you a nag screen and shuts down after about an hour). My suggestion is to use a GVP Impact Series II 2000/4000 HC+8 SCSI board (they're plentiful and cheap), fully populate the RAM on it, and use a SCSI CDROM drive (SCSI ZIP drives work nice too)... Leave the IDE channels for hard drives.
Copying the hard drive as suggested will save your programs, but will not help when it comes to the OS itself. You will definately need to obtain a copy of AmigaOS. 3.1, 3.5 and 3.9 all require 3.1 ROMs... and again, you MUST use the ones made for the A4000.
After that, you can pretty much download anything else you need off the net (with exception to anything still under copyright, of course).
Unless you've got a decent budget for a network card, I'd go ahead and get a SCSI ZIP drive to transfer files from your PC to the A4000. You'll also need to find a good stash of double density floppies, so you can turn those downloaded ADF files into disks (as high density disks just won't work with any kind of reliability, even if you tape the hole).
And of course, if it hasn't been done already, REPLACE THAT CLOCK BATTERY... Even if it looks good right now, that sucker can pop at any time and you don't EVEN want to go down that road. Play it safe, replace it NOW.
Another bit of advice... If your RAM is fully populated (ie: 16MB fast, 2MB chip), don't mess with the SIMMs. By now the plastic retainers have dried out and are brittle as hell. If somehow they do break, a fine dab of superglue at the edges will hold the SIMMs in place.
Another neat toy I've discovered is using a compact flash to IDE adapter and a 32MB+ CF card as your Workbench drive. Make sure the CF card is a highspeed one, and your boot, seek and access times will dramaticly decrease.
Well, that's about all I can think of at the moment... Enjoy your new toy!
