Lookintg forward to firing up my a1200 when my seasonal holidays come around, with this in mind last time I booted the machine the internal hard drive was starting to get those tell tale noises of possible failure. I'm considering swapping it for a compact flash solution so just trying to find the best and safest way to copy all of the contents from the drive (classic os, games etc) ensuring that it remains bootable. I have never installed a drive on the amiga so any information will help.
The machine is accelerated, I cant remember the spec(not sure that is consideration)
I wanted to comment but I was not really sure what kind of set-up you had. Are you using a basic Amiga 1200 case or is the machine in a tower ? What accelerator do you have fitted ? If the machine is a standard A1200 has it been fitted with a 3.5" or does it have the 2.5" ? What OS are you running on the machine ? You should be able to determine just what you have from a visual inspection. Also what tell-tale noises are you hearing. Is the machine booting cleanly and running fine.
If you are just getting cehcksum errors and a partition is not validating then copy the contents from the bad partition to the good one. I often lost my Workbench partition and had a copy on my Work partition. I just formatted the Workbench partition and copied the contents back. And have you checked how big the Workbench partition is. You only need the Workbench or System partition to run the computer so don't worry about your games and stuff. Just that the OS may just drag onto a series of disks. Depends what OS you are running. I also assume you have your original disks.
Not sure about this swapping hard drives and emulators as I have never used one. Best I have done is use a Parnet with the PC. I also fit SCSI kit to my Amigas so I can run a ZIP drive and CD. The ZIP drive can carry the entire contents of the Amigas hard drive. I put that onto CD from a ZIP drive in the PC and CD Burner. Also I have the Amiga Networked which also helps. Never used a compact flash so can't help there.
As soon as you can, if you are keen, you need to work out the way to back up your system. As I say I use a series of SCSI drives, ZIP and CD and have a few copies of everything on CD and spare hard drives and ZIPs. Plus I have other Amigas with the drives contents on. I would be lost without the Workbench on my beloved Amiga 1200... been with me since 1993 and still growing.
Have fun and remember when a door is locked in front of you, don't waste time trying to open it. There is probably another way around. The journey may be longer but the experience is always more rewarding.
