Installing Workbench 3.0 onto a HD

[Leigh_Burton]

Hi, just acquired an Amiga 1200 with a 20mb hard rive and want to install Workbench 3.0 onto it, how would I go about this??

I have the Workbench disks (Workbench, Extras, Fonts, Storage and Locale) but have no clue what to do, the wb3.0 manuals talk about an install disk but i don't have one, is all lost???

[amigauser17]

ok here how to get around it if u have the workbench 3.0 put in the disk drive and once it has loaded go up to the menu and go to the icons menu and look for something that say all files copy all the folder from the workbench 3.0 disk to your hard disc include the hidden ones once u have copy them over remove the disk and restart

p.s the show all files in the icons menu somewhere

hopes this help and good luck with ur amiga

[kd7ota]

Id like to welcome you to amiga.org.  :-D

Copying over the disk to the harddrive would be a great way of booting it from the harddrive, and just copy over all of the files from the other disks. But one problem that stands out is when you go to put in some bigger internal harddrive, then the install disk had the HDToolbox to prepare it. Maybe the 3.0 WB disk already has it??  :-?

[doctorq]

If you didn't understand much of the other answer, then fear no more.

Boot the workbench disk. When all has loaded you should see a disk which says Workbench3.0 and a disk which says Ram Disk.

If more icons turns up, it means that the harddisk is present. If this is the case you don't need the install disk, but if no other icons turns up, you need the install disk to partion your hd.

If a icon comes up, saying something like DH0, HD0, Workbench, Work or anything else, then try to doubleclick it. The disk should open and you can see everything on the disk.

You can check the name of your boot drive by press both mousebuttons at boot, and take a look at the Boot options menu. The drive with a priority saying something else than DF0 and CC0 is your HD boot drive....

To get a clean Workbench3.0 install, just do the following:

Press right Amiga and the letter e at the same time. Then a requester should come up. Type Cli and press enter.

If this doesn't work open the workbench3.0 disk, and find the Shell icon in one of the drawers, and double click the icon.

Type this as it is

format drive DH0: name Workbench ffs

Replace DH0: with the name of your boot drive. This will format you boot drive, and erase all files on the hd.

You can now copy files to the drive. To install the Workbench3.0 set, type the following

copy all df0: to Workbench:

This will copy all the files on the disk to the hd, also the files you can't see. Do this with all of the disk, and remove the disks from the drive.

Finally, reboot the computer, and if everything went well, Workbench will be loaded from your HD  :-)

[Leigh_Burton]

Thanks guys it's great to have such a helpful Amiga community!!!

the HD currently has WB2.0 on it and is split into 2 partitions (work and system 2.0) but came with WB3 on floppys so i thought I would format the HD and install 3.

thanks muchly for the info guys!

[Ilwrath]

Technically, you should also have an "Install 3.0" diskette with your A1200.  The disk contained the tools needed to prep a new or non-Amiga formatted drive.  This diskette came standard with the A1200HD computer, but was NOT included in the early A1200 base models.  

I know, because I bought a new A1200 that had a 160MB Quantum that my dealer installed, and he had to give me a copied A1200 install diskette, as the A1200 didn't ship from C= with the 3.0 Install diskette.  ;-)  

But, if your hard disk is already partitioned, you don't need the install disk, anyhow, and the procedures listed above are fine.  The only tool of use you are missing is the "HDToolBox", and I think it's available free from some places, now, anyhow.

[Leigh_Burton]

the HD already has HDtoolbox on it, can I just copy this over to a floppy and once i've installed 3.0 just copy it back???

[Revener]

Just put it in the other partion if you are afraid of losing it :-)

btw the way if the HD has a program called Dopus/filemaster/dirwork or any other filehandling program (like windows explorer but better) you can use that for moving/copying e.t.c the files instead........

[Ilwrath]

the HD already has HDtoolbox on it, can I just copy this over to a floppy and once i've installed 3.0 just copy it back???

Yeah, that would work.... Maybe even one better would be to make a backup copy of your Workbench 3.0 disk, remove a few files from it (there's some utils in c/ you don't need...) and copy HDToolBox to it.  That way, you'll have a single nice bootable disk with HDToolbox, should disaster ever strike.  

Also, an interesting thing to note on Amiga is that you can write your partition table to a "system-configuration" file.  That can then be backed up on your HDToolBox disk, as well, and if for some reason you ever lose/screw up your partitions, you can boot from the floppy and load the parameters from the backup system-configuration file, and then a simple disk recovery program should be able to save most everything, rather than chalking it up as a total loss of data.