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Amiga Collections: MegaDisc
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MegaDisc 34 (1993-06)(MegaDisc Digital Publishing)(AU)(Disk 1 of 2)[WB].zip
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MegaDisc 34 (1993-06)(MegaDisc Digital Publishing)(AU)(Disk 1 of 2)[WB].adf
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Articles
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HD-Idiot
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HD-Idiot
Wrap
Text File
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1993-06-22
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7KB
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150 lines
FIRST TIME DRIVER:
(or never let an idiot loose with your hard drive
especially yourself)
Paul Statham Apr93
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BACKGROUND:
For five years I mastered the Commodore 64, even managed to get a grip on
the 6502 Machine Code (enough to create a Hi-res Screen and understand how
I did it)
Then I bought an Amiga 500 and struggled to come to terms with the
operating system (If you remember the C64 ran from a BASIC platform) add
to that a second floppy, and a memory expansion with another 2 Meg,
upgrade the kickstart and workbench from 1.2 to 1.3. TextcraftPlus came
with the A500 and along with DataRetrieve, Hicalc, and DPaintII then III
I muddled along.
In 1991 at the World Of Commodore Show, Darling Harbour I found out about
ACAR and Megadisc and a number of Public Domain Software suppliers, The
Learning Curve steepened again, but this time I was getting somewhere.
By Mid 1992 I was reaching the processing limit of the A500 and the
constant disk swapping to run several programs and selectively store the
respective data was becoming irritating. The final decision was to save
furiously to buy an Amiga 3000 at the end of the year.
Sep 1992,
Release in USA of the Amiga 4000,
Nov 1992
available AUS $5,500
Jan 1993
AUS $4,500 (save harder), Consider the A1200, twice the speed of
my A500 and with the new AGA Graphics Chips and WB3.0 (add on possibility
seemed limited) and with a 40Meg HD it was far too small.
Mid March 1993
a friend told me that Sigmacom could supply the A4000 with
the 68030 chip at a saving of $1500. It was soon confirmed with a
telephone call that an Amiga 4000/030 with 2 meg Chip and 2 meg fast and
the 120Meg IDE HardDrive could be ordered, delivery (2 DAYS!!!!!)
I ordered on the Tuesday, made arrangements to be home early Friday
afternoon of the same week (Sigmacom Delivered Free) at a time to suit me.
Sigmacom rang on Friday morning at work to confirm delivery prior to
booking their courier and by 4:30 that afternoon I was opening the two
boxes it all came in.
SO WHAT HAPPENED???
Unpacking was easy, the keyboard in one box the system unit in the other,
a series of seperate manuals on WB3.0, DOS, Arexx, the Harddrive, the A4000
itself, an addendum for /030 purchases. Read enough of the manuals to
ensure I could plug everything together properly and switch it on.
It worked: (I knew it would) someone had helpfully loaded the workbench
software and partitioned a small section of the Harddrive as Workbench3.0
and added a directory called WORK: (ready to go)
First Problem, the mouse wouldn't move:
Was the mouse faulty? there were reports and Sigmacom even said they
had sent some back to Commodore. Try my old A500 mouse (that mouse has
worked for the last five years with the occasional roller cleaning, is
that a record?) still no movement.
Had I plugged the mouse in the wrong port? neither of the ports are
labelled and there is no indication in the manual as which is which (I
assumed the front one was mouse1)
Finally after trying both mice and a joystick in both ports I read some
more of the manual. I'd seen the section before but didn't take much
notice as I figured I'd never use the facility. There's a key operated
LOCK which freezes the mouse movement, (but not the mouse clicks).
Supplied key worked a wonder.....
[
NOTE:
I'd really think since Commodore went to all the trouble of
installing a physical lock on the system it should lock out the mouse
movement, mouse buttons and the entire keyboard whilst leaving the system
running ]
Second Problem, I found the hard drive utility.
This wouldn't have been a problem except I immediately read the section on
partitioning the hard drive without the (in bold) paragraph that said you
would destroy
ALL
data on the disk.
Since I'd spent a couple of nights working out what my disk structure
would be, how much space I thought I would need at what software I was
going to load on first I went and repartitioned the drive.
All was going well until I had to reboot the drive as per instructions.
The system asked for the workbench disk (I obediently feed it in).
The workbench screen came up as before except no DH0: or DH1: that I'd
carefully partitioned. I Warm-Booted to the same result. I turned
everything off and tried from the start, the disk light flashed and I
thought I was getting somewhere. NOPE!!!!
I re-booted and this time held down both mouse buttons to get to the Boot
Option Screen. The hard disk light flashed again but the boot options only
gave me DF0:, totally ignoring the hard drive. But on boot-up I had two
Icons for dh0????? and dh1?????
Then I did something
S T U P I D :
I tried to install the Workbench3.0 software on the hard drive.
The first time it said df0: was write protected so I cancelled
the second time it said it again (it was right it was) so I unprotected it
selected the novice level and away it went. A few seconds later a message
came up to say the disk was full and the installer was abandoning its task.
I re-read the message and SWORE (Profusely) I suddenly realised what I'd
done, Id tried to install the workbench on the workbench Disk.
That disk would now boot the system and open a shell and that was it.
I managed to boot up my 1.3 Workbench disk and get a Directory utility and
text editor going to see what I'd done to the ORIGINAL WB3.0 Disk
Fortunately because the disks are so full the install script had only got
as far as creating a directory called OLD and copying the install log file
Icon to the disk as well as copying the startup-sequence to OLD/s and
starting to rebuild a new startup-sequence.
I copied the startup-sequence back to its rightful place deleted the
logfile.icon and put the write protect tab back ON. I re-booted under
WB3.0 again, read some more of the manual, went back to the HD Utilities,
repartitioned the drive again, relabeled the partions properly and then
FORMATTED the drive, once for each partition.
Installed the Workbench again, this time onto the Harddrive, and away we
went.
LESSONS TO BE LEARNT
NEVER - NEVER - NEVER
read half the manual on anything you've not had
before especially only the second half of the manual.
This is my first HardDrive and while it won't be my last I now know what
NOT
to do to them. I'm only thankful I hadn't merrily gone and loaded half
my software and data on the drive before doing this to it. I really only
lost 2 hours of time and gained enormous experience.
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