Installing games to A1200 HD

[toomanymikes]

Thats fantastic advice Harrison. I'll see how I get on and if I get stuck I'll send you a PM re the SPS.

Cheers!

[toomanymikes]

Hi, I’m almost too embarrassed to write this but I’m stuck – how do you access the hard drive on the Amiga? Do you have to load up the workbench and get to it from there? I did load it up but I couldn’t see anything obvious that suggested it was the HD. Also, is there any way to install the workbench on the HD so I don’t have to put in the disk?
My worry is that when I got the A1200 the keyboard and HD connector cables had come loose – thanks Royal Mail – so I had to open the case up and reconnect them and now I think the HD may have been damaged in transit.

[Demon Cleaner]

You should see the HD, perhaps it's not formatted yet. Of course you should install WB to the HD, so it boots in less than 10 seconds. Just install 3.1 and it will automatically boot from the HD.

[Harrison]

If the HD is unformatted it should appear in Workbench as a NDOS: icon. If you can see this then just select it and format it.

If however you cannot even see this then the HD hasn't been partitioned yet and you will need to get hold of some Amiga partition software on floppy disk in order to do this.

As for installing Workbench to HD, there are manual and automatic methods for doing this. The simplest way is to just copy all of the contents of the Workbench 3 floppy disk into the root of the HD. The Amiga will then just boot from HD. But to get a full install of Workbench onto the HD you can either manually copy the contents of the whole Workbench 3 disk set onto the HD or use the Workbench 3 install disk that comes as part of the full disk set.

[toomanymikes]

Update: I contacted the seller who told me that the A1200 should boot up on to the workbench from the hd as soon as its turned on. I checked again and it turns out that the HD ribbon was not fully inserted into the motherboard - a quick press solved this and now it boots up onto the workbench (wow - I almost sound like I know what I'm talking about). Fantastic! Plus the guy sent a disk with relokick 1.3 so I can reboot it load older games from disk. Happy days!
So all is good you may think, and it is - but I have more questions... The drive comes with the usual workbench folders plus some ones that the seller had preloaded onto it. I get the impression that the guy was pretty into his utilities but as you can probably tell - I aint got a clue! So I was wondering if anyone could shed some light on what they are / do. The folder names are as follows:

Quarterback V7
DMS
UNDMS
Directory OPUS
DMSWB (its icon has DMSII written on it)
Install_Log_File

Any ideas?

[v85rawdeal]

Quarterback:
Back-up Utility
Advanced backup and archiving program for the Amiga. While hard drives represent some of the highest technology that exists in the computer industry, all hard drives will eventually fail. It is not a matter of if, but simply a question of when. If you've invested hours creating pictures, manuscripts, 3-D ray-traces, or spreadsheets, then you need some way to protect your investment. Quarterback gives you that protection by safeguarding your work against any possible loss.

DMS/UnDMS:
Converts .dms Amiga disk images to uncompressed .adf images
This package includes undms, a decompressor for the Amiga DMS disk image format. It outputs ".adf" (11 sector per track, 80 tracks, 512 bytes/sector) uncompressed disk images which may be written directly to disk on NetBSD/amiga or used with an Amiga emulator.

DMSWB:
DMSWB is a Workbench based version of DMS. It works just like DMS but is iconbased.
DMSWB has more advantages, such as being multitasking, so you can write a DMS file, while you're viewing the information about it, or you can compress a disk using another drive. Because DMSWB can do 4 commands at a time, you have 4 information outputs on the right side of the DMSWB window.

DirectoryOpus:
File Management Software
Directory Opus is the best and most productive file manager for the Amiga. All actions like moving, deleting, extracting etc can be done faster and easier with this program. The PC version is also top-notch.

Install_log_file sounds like just some references for software installations.

Hope that helps! If it doesn't, I am sure that someone else will clarify anything I have got wrong!

[Demon Cleaner]

DMSWB is a Workbench based version of DMS.