Installing Workbench 3.9 on A1200

[Thomas]

Q2: How big should the new WB parition be? (for 3.9)

As a minimum OS3.9 needs around 20 MB. Add another 10 MB if you want to install other system software like MUI on the boot partition.

Generally I'd use a ratio of 20:80 for System:Work on small HDDs, but never more than 500MB for the boot partition on large HDDs.

Bye,
Thomas

[Thomas]

IIRC, creating an emergency floppy doesn't work unless you have a High Density Floppy Drive (Great going OS3.9 team).

That's nonsense. You must create an emergency floppy first, anyway. You cannot install OS3.9 from a running OS3.1 system, you have to boot OS3.5 or 3.9 first (well, you can, but you will get random problems like strange-looking icons). That's what the emergency floppy is for. And certainly a DD floppy is totally sufficient.

Then I suggest you install WB3.x either on the partition you're gonna install 3.9 on (and install OS3.9 over it) or make another bootable partition just for running the installation program from which you can later remove. (or keep as a WB3.x partition).

That's nonsense, too. Once you have an emergency disk, you don't need any part of OS3.1 any more. The best way to install OS3.9 is to boot from the emergency disk, use OS3.9's HDToolbox to partition the HDD and install OS3.9 onto a freshly formatted partition. This way you don't keep any old files which might cause problems.

Bye,
Thomas

[Thomas]

when I tried to create a floppydisk back in my A1200 days the disk got "full" during the creation.

Did you say "yes" to the question if you use IDEfix ? IDEfix does not completely fit on a DD floppy. But once you see the "disk full" requester, you can delete all the not-needed IDEfix drivers and then click on "continue". Everything which is needed does fit on the floppy.

Why, oh why didn't they make OS3.5 and 3.9 on floppies?

What a crap ! I didn't even think of floppies for several years now. Floppies are old and outdated media. You need only one single floppy disk, because the Amiga cannot boot from CD, but everything else can be stored on CD or even DVD.

Bye,
Thomas