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Creating a boot disk for A1200


Randy

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So you have the CF card and want to format and use a new CF card? The simplest option might be to use UAE to access the first card, then copy the entire Workbench disk to somewhere, then format the new card and copy it back.

 

If you really want to start from scratch, your best bet might be to get an image of all six Workbench disks: Install, Workbench, Extras, Fonts, Locale and Storage, write them all to disks and start from there. If you want to use more than 4GB of the new card, you'll also need to have a new filesystem, and whatever you need to patch or replace the scsi.device driver, e.g. scsi.device v43.45 and the LoadModule command, all on another disk. Boot from the Install disk, set up your partitions with HDToolbox, reboot, format the partitions, run the installer and that should be it.

 

Workbench is spread across several disks, but most of the core OS is actually in the Kickstart ROM, so you need very little on a floppy disk to actually boot it. But for full functionality, you'll need quite a bit, and to install a full Workbench, you basically need everything that's on the six install disks.

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What I want to do is to take the files I need off of my current CF card, which has WB 3.1 as well as other files, and create floppy(s) I would need to both boot the computer without a working CF card, and then make a working CF card from those file, another CF card if you will.  Another question I have is: how do I make a backup of my files on my running CF card?  Do I pull the card out and copy the files onto my windows 10 machine and then copy those files back onto a fresh CF card?  I'm thinking at the very least I need a CF card formatted to be able to use on the Amiga and not just some CF card formatted on a windows machine, does that make sense?

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Yeah, I thought that's what you were doing, but it's kinda awkward to do if you can't mount both CF cards in the Amiga at the same time. If you're comfortable working in the Shell or a very limited Workbench, the minimum you will need is probably:

 

From SYS:C

    Assign

    Copy

    LoadWB

 

From SYS:Tools

    HDToolbox

 

From SYS:System

    Format

 

After you format the boot floppy, you'll need to use the Install command to install a boot block on it by typing the following in a Shell window:

 

Install DF0:

 

You'll also need whatever additional drivers and filesystems you might need in order to use larger drives, if you intend to use above 4GB of the card. This might include newer versions of scsi.device and FastFileSystem than are in the ROM, along with the LoadModule command or whatever you use to load them.

 

That should enable you to set up and format the drive, after which you can use whatever means you like to copy everything else off the old drive and onto the new one.

 

You can't read the files directly on Windows as the cards need to be set up for Amiga-style partitions and filesystems. You can do a raw block copy as suggested, which will get you a 1:1 copy of the original drive, but that will be the same size as the original too, so even if the new card has a higher capacity, it will only show up as the same size as the old one. The simplest way, if you have Windows, is to set it up in WinUAE and use that environment to set up the new card and copy over the entire Workbench installation.

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