It Lives!!!!

[andy82i]

Hi All!

After using OS3.9 on UAE for way too long with my old A1200 sat in the corner looking at me hopefully I decided to give it a quick power up the other day. It booted 1st time but wasnt too happy about using any screenmodes above 8 colours. I kept trying & eventually it gave me a full 256 colour Workbench  :-D
The clock bat was dead so I pulled one out of a spare windows box (see, they CAN be useful!)
Anyway, I just went mad & bought a 32mb simm for my Magnum 030 & a set of OS 3.1 roms off ebay. Now I just need to find the best way to get OS3.9 installed, hopefully on the space 20GB laptop hard drive Ive got.

Any Suggestions?

[InTheSand]

Does your A1200 have a CD drive, network card, or some other way of transferring large amounts of data to it?

CD is the most straightforward way - just insert the disc, boot from OS3.9 floppy (which you'll have to create) and away you go.

The easiest way without a CD drive is to archive the OS3.9 CD's files, transfer that to the A1200, then unarchive and install.

If you can't do large data transfers, you could always get a 2.5" to 3.5" IDE adaptor, plug your A1200's drive into your PC and then install OS3.9 on it from within WinUAE...

 - Ali

[amigagr]

what do you mean ''the best way''? there is only one way to do it. insert the cd and go, if you have a cdrom driver of course! make an emergency floppy and boot from it. install the latest smartfilesystem from aminet create partitions to the hd, the first no more than 512mb-1gb and you are ready to go!

[andy82i]

Hi!
Thanks for the quick reply.
No CD drive or network. Cant even get files over on floppy as none of my Windows machines read DD floppys.
Would installing from UAE work with a USB IDE controller? Ive had trouble with one of these in UAE before but it really is looking like my best option so far as I already have one here somewhere

[andy82i]

Sorry, I ahould have said I have no CD drive on the A1200.

As for network cards I have an old 3com pcmcia card. Are 3com cards supported with any network card drivers from Aminet?

[amigagr]

andy82i wrote:
Hi!
Thanks for the quick reply.
none of my Windows machines read DD floppys.


they do but they don't read amiga floppys


Would installing from UAE work with a USB IDE controller?

i'm not sure what you mean but you can do this: connect the hd to the pc, run winuae and with HDToolbox partition the disk, mark the first partition as bootable and format all the partitions.
all these through winuae, the hd must be formated in the amiga way. after this, copy all the files from your virtual amiga disks/partitions to the partitions on the real disk. unplug the hd from the pc plug it to the amiga and try to boot..........

[amigagr]

http://de4.aminet.net/hard/drivr/3c589.lha

some of them yes with this driver but you need a lot of other software too, tcp/ip etc.

[andy82i]

I used to use cross dos a few years ago but none of my windows xp machines that im using now will read or even format a 720k floppy.
Will UAE not allow me to format the drive?

[andy82i]

Thanks for the link amije. I will give the drivers a try after I get OS3.9 running.

[amigagr]

the winxp don't formating the dd disks directly but you can do it from a dos prompt, or from your amiga with crossdos, but in your case this is not what you want.

uae is a virtual amiga so it will format the hard disk drive as if this drive was connected on a real amiga.

[andy82i]

I will try to format & install from UAE tomorow in preperation for the arival of my new roms.
Thanks for the help  :-)

[amigagr]

good luck pal :-)

[andy82i]

Cheers, Im gonna need it!

[InTheSand]

Hi,

Any drive controllers seem to work fine with WinUAE - I've tried parallel IDE/ATA, USB-based IDE/ATA and SCSI, all without problems, and the emulated Amiga environment has been able to format, partition and access data with no hassle.

 - Ali

[andy82i]

Ok so Ive got my spare 20GB laptop hard drive in a USB contoller & Ive managed to get UAE to partition & format it (its doing it right now)ready for me to install OS3.9. All I need now is for my 3.1 roms to get here & hopefully Ill be all set!
Things never go as planned though... Ive had to spend half my time sorting out one of my XP machines. Its decided to have hard drive trouble.

Thanks to everyone for your help  :-)