Well I pulled one of the drives out of the A3000 since I plan to use a bigger drive in that anyway and cleaned it off, it works just fine in the A2000 but I couldn't figure out how to install Workbench, I must be missing the disk with the installer. At any rate the machine worked fine and I had fixed all the hardware issues - cleaned up the battery damage, replaced the CPU socket, replaced the ancient 5.25" hard drive, fixed the blown mouse fuse, verified that it boots fine off floppies and plays games. Not wanting to sit on it any longer I gave it back to the owner and figured he can work on the software side if he wants.
As much as I love the Amiga, I've been spoiled by modern PCs in this respect. Pop in a CD/DVD, boot up the OS, partition/format/install, it's so painless in comparison. On the other hand, I still remember having to load Debug and use g=c800:5 on the old PC/XT boxes to do a low level format on the MFM drive, I don't miss that.
To be fair, normally it's not vastly different to modern day OS installations.
Pop in a floppy disk (if you can find it), boot up the OS, partition/format/install.
