Classicamiga Forum Retro Edition
Thread: installing amigaOS 3.1 into HD
odium 17:35 6th December 2009
hi there,


i've adquired a GVA series II SCSI controller with a 4GB HD, i'm planing to
install amigaOS 3.1 into it to stop using the floppy discs boot process.

Now, i'm searching some kind of tutorial about how to install the amigaOS into the
HD and now to boot directly from it.

any good tutorials that you may advise to follow ?

note: machine is A2000 3.1ROM and i also have a SCSI cdrom ! in case there is a cdrom install method.

thanks !
[Reply]
Harrison 23:58 7th December 2009
Simple straight forward way is to boot the Amiga from the Workbench install floppy disk. Partition and format the HDD. And finally copy the contents of all of the Workbench disk set into your first boot partition of the HDD. And that is all you need to do. Job done. Workbench should now boot from the HDD if the SCSI controller supports HDD booting from it.

However, as it is a 4GB HDD then you have to be careful about a few things. The standard Amiga file system FFS only supports HDD's up to 4GB total size, with 2GB maximum partition size. But these are the limits. If using the standard FFS file system then make the total size used just under 4GB and make the initial boot system partition under 2GB. It only needs to be a few 100MB at most as you will never use that much space for the system partition anyway.

If you want to take things much further than I highly recommend you take a look at the ClassicWB (Classic Workbench) pre-configured workbench packages by our very own Bloodwych. http://classicwb.abime.net/ You could download and copy the setup files for the package you wish to use onto a CD to access in the Amiga and copy to the HDD. The ClassicWB packages contain self installers which ask for your workbench disks during the installation process, and then when you reboot you have a nicely setup Workbench environment with lots of useful extras already installed and setup.

You can also look at using a different third party filing system on the HDD. SFS is one of the best, and you can find a detailed tutorial on how to set this up on our wiki here.
[Reply]
Tags:Array
Up