Amiga 500 Questions

[lsmart]

Your A500 may have a ram expansion board installed. They typically include a battery backed up clock.
The problem with the AmigaForever Workbench is not the legality: How do you plan to transfer the files to a floppy? PC formatted diskettes cannot be used to boot an Amiga and a PC cant write Amiga-Format. So you pretty much have to have an already working Amiga to create the disks.
Harddrives could be formatted on a PC (at least theoretically) but a vanilla A500 has no HD.

[lsmart]

However, I can transfer quite a bit of the stuff this way.

Right, but it doesn´t help the OP, because he needs his initial Workbench disk to read anything that isn´t FFS or OFS formatted. You need PC0: to read FAT/MS-DOS and this is not in the Kickstart.

You could however use Public domain software to get there. There are many bootable PD-disks some of them even include a stripped down Workbench. And then there is (IIRC) e.g. MessyDos (MD0:) which will do the same thing as workbenchs PC0:.

If you want to go this way you should have at least 1M of RAM or better - a second diskdrive. It will take some time to get up and running.

It´s perhaps easier to get a preowned copy of Workbench on eBay.