Installing Workbench 3.9 on A1200

[irishmike]

Hello all:

Now we come to the fun part, now that we solved getting the CD ROM to work in OS 3.1.   I am ready to install 3.9 except that I seem to have a new little problem:

It seems that whoever (it was not I) partitioned my little 2 GB hard drive made the Workbench partition a bit small... look like roughly 7 GB.   I now need to wipe the hard drive and re-partition it, something I have not done too much of, so review of this may be in order.

Q:  Can I make an emergency boot disk for OS 3.9 and do the hard disk work then install?  Would be better than re-installing 3.1 and AMICDFS and then trying to proceed with the install.

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

Thanks for the help as always and I hope that this is not a rerun of another question -- I did search before I posted it.

Take care and hope someone can help!

Mike

[motorollin]

Create an emergency disk and boot from it. It will load OS3.9 from the CD. Then use HDToolBox from the CD to repartition the drive. Format the new partitions and then run the installer from the OS3.9 CD.

--
moto

[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

[fx]

IIRC, creating an emergency floppy doesn't work unless you have a High Density Floppy Drive (Great going OS3.9 team). But if your Harddrive is only 2GB you can use HDToolbox from 3.0 or 3.1 to partition it.

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).

[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

[fx]

Well might be nonsense to you but I'm almost certain that when I tried to create a floppydisk back in my A1200 days the disk got "full" during the creation.

I have made many installations where I have created a second partition with OS3.1 and installed from that (note, installed to another partition). That doesn't leave any old crap laying around.

Why, oh why didn't they make OS3.5 and 3.9 on floppies? If it was compressed and all junk like backdrop pictures and Amplifier was left out I'm sure it could have fitted on 7-8 DD floppies or something (if not less).

[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

[fx]

Thomas wrote:
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.

Well, what about those of us who doesn't want to have a external CD-ROM lying besides our A1200's, or those of us who doesn't own an external PCMCIA SCSI CD-ROM, or those of us who doesn't want a CDROM in our A4000D case because it doesn't really fit and therefor somewhat "bends" the case, do you really think it would be that much more trouble installing from a couple floppies?

I wouldn't have complained as much if the installation procedure wasn't so very crappy, but let's face it. Installing OS3.9 on a machine that doesn't already have anything on the harddrive (I.E an old workbench or anything) is a real pain in the ass.

If you already have an emergency floppy that is working for your system and a CD-ROM connected, well sure, then it's not a big problem. But I have never had that ready when I've been about to install 3.9.

[patrik]

@Thomas:

First:
1. No regular Amiga has a CD/DVD player per default
2. Even if a CD/DVD is added, especially to the more popular models like the A1200, it is not trivial for many users how to make the computer read the CD/DVD.

If they had put the real OS stuff on disks and optionally stored all the unecessary crap which can be found on OS3.5/3.9 CD, on a separate CD labeled "CRAP", they would not have needed more than about 10 disks.

Sure, that is a handful of disks, but not unreasonably many and it would have made the OS3.5/3.9 installation much more user friendly.


/Patrik

[Lando]

What they 'should' have done with 3.5 / 3.9, was release them with a new ROM chip which contained support for booting from CD.  Then it would have been a simple matter of installing the new ROM's, and booting from the OS 3.9 CD.

[irishmike]

Hello All:

Well I have the Emergency Boot Disk made and booted into it fine.  But Apparently I need to do something with the resolution of the monitor because the buttons for HDToolkit are off the screen.

The monitor is a 1084S.

How do we adjust the screen to like 800 x 600 or the like?

EDIT:  Figured out the partitoning... just used my 3.1 HDToolbox to get them done.  Still not sure about what I am going to do to get a good resolution for the A1200, this is probably going to require a scandoubler, flickerfixer VGA solution or just a move to the A4000 as soon as possible?

Would like to see the stuff on my screen :-)

EDIT2:  This is done... 3.9+ BB1 and 2 up and running on the A1200.



Thanks,

Mike