AmigaOS 3.1 upgrade on my A4000

[drewz21]

I'll start off with more praise to AmigaKit as I got my 3.1 ROMs and 3.1 OS in the mail yesterday.  Everything was packed very well and the included instructions were easy to follow.  I've had good experiences with both AmigaKit and Softhut with AmigaKit having a slight edge partly because of their wonderful support on these forums.  You guys will be getting more orders from me in the future as soon as I explain to my wife why I need more Amiga stuff.  

I took about 45 minutes disassembling my A4000 and pulling out my 3.0 ROMs since I didn't have a chip extractor and had to use a combination of my small Swiss Army knife and a small flathead screwdriver.  I then took about 15 more minutes getting the new 3.1 ROMs in.  I was very methodical and made some drawings of the machine as I went.  I did learn a lot about the insides of the A4000 that I didn't know before.

The ROM upgrade went off without a hitch.  Well, I did bend 2 of the pins on the old U176 3.0 ROM chip taking it out.  I'm gonna pick me up a chip extractor.  

Computer booted up fine and the correct Kickstart version showed up in Workbench.

I then set about installing the 3.1 OS.  My computer came with OS 3.0 as well as Kickstart 3.0 and was working fine.  It also came with ASIMCDFS 3.0 for the CD-ROM drivers and was working fine.  The install went off without a problem until the reboot.  After rebooting the computer would Guru, (I know Guru is gone but I'm nostalgic that way) as it tried to load the ASIMCDFS drivers at boot time.  It did this every time.  

Luckily I had not loaded much on my A4000 yet so I put in the 3.1 Install disk and formatted my 4GB drive partitioning it to a 1GB OS section and a 3GB Work section.  After rebooting everything worked fine except the CD of course.  I had the floppy disk with the ASIMCDFS drivers and then reloaded them.  Did the Novice install and took all the defaults except my buffer settings, I put them on my HD1: partition, rebooted and it worked fine.

So now I've got 3.1 all around on my A4000 and it works just fine.  

I just wanted to relay my experience with this in case anyone else runs across a similar issue.

Now to put AmigaOS 3.5 on.  

[amigagr]

Now to put AmigaOS 3.5 on.  

if you ask, yes, but if you don't bought it yet, go for the 3.9

[drewz21]

I already bought 3.5.  I thought it was a pretty good price from AmigaKit and now combined with my other Amigas I've got OS 1.2 through 3.5.  I thought OS 3.9 needed more RAM.  I've only got 16MB Fast and 2MB Chip on my 68040/25.  No graphics card either.

Would that be powerful enough to run OS 3.9?

[tonyvdb]

yes it can run 3.9 just as a stock 4000. I only have 3.5 like you and it seems to run stable I have not had it crash on me yet and I run a VT Flyer system. I recently added a Cyberstorm PPC so I would get more out of 3.9 then you would.

[amigagr]

it's ok to run the standard 3.9, even my a3000d can do it!
the problem starts when you want more than this and it hapens quiet the same in all amigas and the other computers.
more power more disk more ram, it never stops this hunting

[TjLaZer]

I installed OS 3.9 on my stock A4000 040 with 16MB and it runs ok.  But trying to go online with it, even with my Cybervision 64 card, it's barely cutting it.  I run out of memory all the time!  I would highly recommend a accelerator card with 64MB+ for web browsing...