Amiga OS switching

[maxx11111]

hi
im currently re:getting into the amiga, had a spare tv and bought a desk to use for my old amiga.
and as im setting up,deciding what to install i wondered is there a way to install multiple os's and select which to boot also a minimal boot?
thanks for any help

[magnetic]

Yes you can setup multiple partitions on a drive and make them bootable with priorities. This is all done in HD toolbox which is in sys:tools iirc

[maxx11111]

Yes you can setup multiple partitions on a drive and make them bootable with priorities. This is all done in HD toolbox which is in sys:tools iirc

ok thanks i will have to play with that
is it easy to switch between them?

[guest11527]

ok thanks i will have to play with that
is it easy to switch between them?

Amiga works different than a PC. Unfortunately, a good deal of the operating system is in ROM, so you cannot just switch between the versions by selecting a different  boot partition. You would need some minimal hardware to switch between two ROMs, or a software tool such as MuKickROM or SKick to load a different ROM version into RAM.

[Rob]

Amiga works different than a PC. Unfortunately, a good deal of the operating system is in ROM, so you cannot just switch between the versions by selecting a different  boot partition. You would need some minimal hardware to switch between two ROMs, or a software tool such as MuKickROM or SKick to load a different ROM version into RAM.

For 1.x and 2.x sure, but 3.1, 3.5, 3.9, Morph OS and OS4 all use the 3.1 rom and there are other operating systems that run on Amiga too.

Does anyone use a shell script to create an effective boot menu on their Amiga?

[nyteschayde]

I had a hacky script setup that did the appropriate assigns needed to point to different system installations on a single partition. This worked fine most of the time. I could boot between OS4 on my A1200 or OS3.9. It was easily configurable to work with all the kickstarts but anything less than 3.1 needed to be kicked into RAM.

The primary startup script would check a directory and based on which files were present, it'd setup the appropriate system directories and then relaunch S:Startup-Sequence after S: had been reassigned to the new Sys:S directory.

I knew how to use it but it wasn't really in a redistributable form. I thought about writing a small tool to make it better. There are also some files on aminet that will detect if a mouse button is down (left or right) during startup and execute some command if it is. Some folks use this as their trigger to load another OS.

[ribdevil1]

I have 3 boot partitions, OS3.9, OS3.9 WarmUP and 4.0 Classic.
At boot, I press the two mouse buttons, and select the boot partition.
I think it's impossible to switch from one OS to another, in the same partition.

[nyteschayde]

It's definitely possible to do so on the same partition, it just takes a little more work.

[maxx11111]

I have 3 boot partitions, OS3.9, OS3.9 WarmUP and 4.0 Classic.
At boot, I press the two mouse buttons, and select the boot partition.
I think it's impossible to switch from one OS to another, in the same partition.

this sounds like the way to go wasn't particularly looking for a menu system