Amithlon on Sony Vaio

[amiface]

Hey folks, So I tried to install Amithlon on my Sony Vaio and what happened was, it booted "isolinux" or something like that, with an amithlon boot screen. An Amiga boing ball appeared and started bouncing around the screen (there was one frame of it left in the top left as well as what looked like a flashing cursor). This is it im afraid, I dont know what was meant to happen but the ball just kept bouncing forever... can anyone help me work out whats going wrong? I really want this to work on my Vaio?? I want to devote a partition to it etc, what do I need to do to set up Amithlon? Can it be installed on a partition without QNX? do I need qnx for amithlon or just amigaos XL? Whats the difference.. All I want is the best performance, lowest hassle option so that I can boot into the amiga and use it. If using QNX means I can integrate them more seemlessly then excellent Id be well up for trying QNX anyway!

Any advice you can give me would be great,

Thanks.

AmiFace.

[amiface]

Thank you very much I will certainly give it a go. It doesnt look that simple but Im preying it works - I tried Amiga Forever and it was a terrible waste of money. I read so often that you plonk the cd for amithlon in and it works perfectly, what a lie! Also is the QNX/AmigaOSXL combination any good?? What version of QNX do I need (there's neutrino and qnx v4), on their site it appears that you cannt get this for free anymore!

What is the fastest possible way to run amigaos on a pc? Am I right in thinking once I get amithlon set up it will be really brilliant!? :-)

Ironically I have a PPC amiga and want OS4.0 but its starting to cost me a fortune to keep the damn thing running before another part burns out.. it feels like the Delorian from back to the future.

[amiface]

emulators than run in windows make me physically ill and completely destroy what im trying to do.. despite that flipping from screen to screen is very annoying and slow and winuae is just plain annoying..it didnt save any of my prefs either - i want something more substantial like amithlon. Also the 10x 060 speed, was not like that for me, it was about the same speed as an 060 often and sometimes slower.

[amiface]

Im wiorking through the amithlon guide, and ive got to:

"3) Add two partitions so you end up with something like:
|||Primary||
AmithlonSys: must be formatted as Fat32 and set as Primary partition.
VirtualHDD: can be formatted to whatever. It is best set as Primary and MUST have the
partition type set to &76. ( This is where you find out if your partition software is any good! )"


What program can I use to set partition type? I have partition magic 8 but iu see no opotion to set the type to "&76".. anyone any ideas? now its xmas I have some time to do this so I want to get it going!!

[amiface]

Thanks very much for the prompt response! That is exactly what   I was preying for, I`ll try that program now, cheers.

[amiface]

Ok more complications,

5) Copy the contents of Grub.rar somewhere ( That may as well be your AmithlonSys:
partition too. ) It should contain one folder called: 'Grub Floppy Image'. This should contain:
diskio.dll, grub-0.97-i386-pc.img, and rawwritewin.exe
6) Stick a writable floppy in your drive and run rawwritewin.exe It should be self
explanatory: You're trying to get rawwritewin.exe to write the floppy image grub-0.97-i386-pc.
img to the floppy drive! ie: (A):

and

Install Grub:
1) Boot PC with new Grub install floppy in the Drive. ( You did remember to set booting
from floppy in your BIOS? )
You'll get:
Grub loading stage2.......

etc..

What if you dont have a floppy drive??? There must be a way on windows to mount a fake foppy drive to write to and boot from etc?

If not the only option I can think of is buying a USB floppy drive which seems a bit extreme..

[amiface]

Hey could you tell me where the option is in Acronis? Im using Acronis Disk Director Suite, Ive managed to make a partition fine but I dont see the option to set the type top &76..

[amiface]

luck is certainly what you need, what a nasty process fraught with errors.. now im trying to get the img floppy image to somehow boot up from my usb stick..... really someone needs to make a proper installer for this amithlon so it works ..

[amiface]

McSquirrel can you tell me what version of nero you were using? I finally found my nero and got it installed and couldnt find the explicit bootable option, but I made a cd anyway and it didnt work of course .. Can you give me some specific details on exactly how to do it (ie, load nero->select cd->whatever?) - it would be much appreciated.

[amiface]

Ok, well I made a big post and I lost it as stupid bloody vista crashed so i`ll make this snappy. First thanks alot for the help i much appreciate it and I find this forum extremely helpful compared to almost every other one Ive seen.

So this is whats happened,

Got the boot cd working (thanks mcsquirrel!!!) and managed to successfully install the new boot system, rebooted and got the new boot menu. My original XP OS was top of the list, and all the new amiga ones underneath.. so I selected XP to boot.

However the Sony Vaio thinks its got a damaged XP install somehow, and the only option its offering is the Vaio recovery utility which promises to "restore the hd to its factory state". So, now I cant boot up my XP os... and im a confused as to what to do next, as I dont want to factory reset the HD. So, why does the vaio think it needs to be recovered like this, why doesnt it just boot as normal?? Anyone got any clues, my laptop is basically not able to do anything really now, I have not tried any of the amithlon boot options as the last thing i saw from the pdf guide was DONT try any of the amithlon options yet..

Advice would be much appreciated, right now im installing a new instance of Winblows on it to try and get access to the files etc.

[amiface]

Hey, thanks for the tips on that. I have now managed to get XP reinstalled, and now the vaio doesnt know what it is anymore and the recovery partition is dead (doh) meaning this time windows did boot!.. I edited the menu.lst as described and tried to boot amithlon....

Unfortunately every single option boots to a point but then stops with "PCI: Device 00:1f.1 not available because of resource collisions"...

Now im thinking, hang on, pci? laptop? was it ever gonna work? Im also pretty sure its a SATA drive and not an IDE!! :-(

(spec)
http://www.microanvika.com/product.asp?TXT=INFO&PNO=SON14921

Please tell me there is a way to proceed, ive come so far, for a second there I was stupid enough to get excited about it actually working!!


PS. i did not set the virtualHDD to "type &76" I have Acronis but I cannot really see a way to do it, is this related?

[amiface]

lol, I just bought Amiga forever, it seemed like such a nice solution when i realised this was just not going to happen!! it has some nice looking linuxey boot type stuff now so it may serve my needs. I take back my earlier hatred of other emulations :-)

long live amiga.

thanks for all the help guys, hope xmas is treating you well. What I got was a LEGO Mindstorms NXT kit, and the Java Api to go with it, very geeky, very enjoyable, very amiga

[amiface]

Yeh you would think so, but then it again boils down talented people wanting the cash they deserve, and the amiga cannot support them. Its a wonder they have any talent left to work on the likes of Amithlon and Umilator (which Id kill a pack of wolves for btw).

I have been holding out for years for someone to make a complete JVM for AmigaOS, and Im still waiting.. At times I do think about getting my coding hat on for it but then I think, no, the pay just wont be there :-/

Im wondering how fast this kxlinux version of amiga forever will be, but I will have to apease my gfs need to shop til she drops and do it tonight! :pissed:

[amiface]

Well unfortunately the vaios bios is as frugal as hell with no options like that :-( I have basically decided to give up and focus on amiga forever and see if it can do what I want.. weirdly though I bought the online edition because it kept going on about kxlight and now I come to actually install it and I cannot see any mention of it at all.... having said that running on windows on this vaio seems way faster than my last and without the problems.. but im still going to need atleast 2 or 3 weeks of proper usage tosee if its right for me. One of my main problems is the mouse is too slow even on full speed! I can speed it up with acceleration but then its just confusing, Im guessing there will be some WBhack for this.

Running WB at MASSIVE resolutions is doable in 8 bit (not higher) but its sweet, more news soon..

[amiface]

Ok folks, maybe this should go in a new thread??

Ive finally got amiga forever working, and exactly as it was 2 years ago when I tried it, it just wont save some preferences. Other Amiga users have suggested that its more of an executive toy than a serious tool, but I find that hard to believe.

Here is what doesnt work for me, a quick example, FKEY, whenever I define a key, save and reboot, all evidence of what Ive saved has vanished.

What could possibly cause this??

AmiFace.