A1200 - need to know more stuff

[Damion]

 3.1 ROM's will eventually be a must for 3.5 or better, but I wouldn't worry about that until you get an accellerator and more memory(I think 3.5 needs a few megs of fastram).

3.5 will run somewhat with 3.0 roms, but you will need 3.1 for full compatability.

OS 3.0 is actually a very usable OS for the machine you will be running it on, despite a few annoying quirks. Using less colors on the WB will help keep the speed up until you upgrade. I bought a stock 1200 in Feb. and used it with nothing more than a hard drive until just recently, and I thought it did a fabulous job considering its resourses!

[Damion]

Now that one's a real bugger. I have had lots of problems with bigger HD's on my 1200. If HD tool box doesn't recognize everything fully, you may need to manually modify some things. The software that came with your 4-way adapter (ELBOX EIDE) should have a fix for this (but it lamely divides up your partitions) , and 0s3.5 and up have somewhat of a mediocre fix. I also use PFS3 on some of my bigger partitions just in case.

As long as the drive is not bigger than 8gb and your partitions stay under 4gb you should be just fine.

I believe aminet has some programs to help with this, but I'm not sure on the specifics of those.

Basically, just fiddle around with it for a time or two and you'll get it!
 :-)

[Damion]

Yeah, but they still don't fully solve the problem. Some drives are easier to configure than others, but I had a real hard time even with 3.9 and the 'patches'. HD toolbox wouldn't report the specs and size of my drive properly, even though it worked fine on the laptops I tried it on. I had to modify the settings manually and hope for the best.

[Damion]

 I think it's a little bit of both.

 SFS sounds like a good way to go, I did the same thing using PFS.

After reading the aforementioned Beyond the 4gb Barrier article, I can say that this also mirrors my experience (and how many others?) and is also very sound advice.

[Damion]

 Well, the best fix is to get the 3.1 roms eventually. Do you have 3.0 to use? 3.1 isn't much different. In that case I would just wait until 3.5 or 3.9 to get the 3.1 roms.

I think I'm ready for 3.5 beers! :-)