Advice on Installing OS 3.9 on an A4000 desktop

I am new to the Amiga platform. Instead of walking into the woods without a flashlight, I though I’d post here to see if anyone has some thing I should look out for, or advice.

I have an A4000 (desktop) I bought from someone in Canada (not via EBay). Right now there is a generic OS 3.1 install on a 4 Gig IDE. Drive. I’ve had problems getting stuff like Deneb USB to install and work since there seems to be lots of libraries missing, not to mention the “Installer” which I managed to copy off the ASIM CDFS floppy, but Deneb still complains about it being a older version and old Poseidon will install, the other tools won’t. The XSurf network card won’t install either, so I have no way of getting other software on my machine.

So rather than struggle with OS3.1, I decided to give 3.9 a try.

I have a 3.9 CDROM I bought from Jon Hare and I would like to do a fresh install of it onto the machine.

The machine has 128 Megs of RAM on a Warp Engine 040 and 16 Megs via RAM on the motherboard. The machine has 3.1 ROMs.

I also have an A2091 with 7.0 Roms and the 08 Western Digital Chip on it. I am using that just for an external CDROM. Trying put fit an internal CDROM was a tight fit, so I decided against it. A SCSI one was impossible.

I would like to replace the IDE drive with a SCSI and use the SCSI controller on the Warp Engine for that. I have tons of SCSI disk around since I have a lot of SGI workstations and accessories.

I was planning on using a 32Gig Seagate SCSI drive as the main boot drive. I have an 80 to 50 pin converter. I will jumper the drive to 0 (actually no jumpers).

I’ve heard that I should create a boot partition no larger than 4 gigs (from the beginning of the drive), it is true?

What is the max partition size of OS 3.9? I would want to create a second partition for the rest of the drive.

Any advice is welcome.

Thanks,

Jackson

Just to see what was what I'm afraid my approach would be > take existing IDE hard drive out; put in different IDE hard drive and run a 3.9 install and see what I got. Not overly technical I agree but hey if everything worked first time - it would be great and it would give a good base line to work from :)

You will undoubtedly get better and more learned advice from the others here though (Zetr0, Merlin, Harrison, RKauer, andylandy; r0jaws and so on hehe)

Cheers

John

Basic advice: create a small boot partition. For 3.9 not much over 120Mb up to 240Mb.

Then partition the drive in how many other parts you want, not using more than 4 visible in total.

I also strongly recommend a dedicated partition for YAM (the e-mail program) and other smallish (around 40Mb) to use as cache for the browser. If those became corrupted nothing really valuable will be lost.

A partition of ~4Gb for games is more than enough.

So you can have non-visible partitions as well as visible? In the "PC" world you can have many partitions on a drive, but only 3 "primary" (bootable) partitions. This goes for any OS (Linux, which is what I work with the most), but they are all visible (need to be mounted).

On Amiga all partitions can be auto-mounted (select on HD tools of your choice), and on 3.5/3.9 you can choose which ones will be visible (check on prefs).

Also you can mount not-mounted partitions using any Amiga OS version, at least from 1.3 onwards.

@ jackson 312

Nice Rig m8. :nod:

SCSI all the way m8y & run the Hard Drive from your Warp Engine SCSI. Be sure you're running 60ns SIMMS on her though. ;)
SCSI to SCSI is great on Amiga's, but you could ditch the A2091 & get rid of the Wait-States involved with the ZORRO Plane & the Mobo by chucking the CDROM on the Warp Engie SCSI as well. ;)

RE: Boot Partition, rkauer is spot on. Keep it small & don't forget, AmigaDOS Hard drive utilities are useless beyond 4GB. With a drive of that size, you'd be better off with another FileSystem such as PFS3 etc. FileSystem will determine your Max Partition size. Afaik, 32GB is the max size allowed for Partition size under FFS, but it depends on the block size. Go over to Amiga.org & ask the question to thomas (a guy in Germany) or do a Google search for it.

RE: Hiding Partitons under OS3.9, go to Prefs/Workbench & hide all you like. :thumbsup:

Best wishes.

Kin

Forgive my ignorance, what what is the Afaik filesystem? I am familiar if FFS and the OFS. Is it something supported by directly by 3.9, or would I need an additional driver disk of some sort.

I will inquire about the max size of FFS on a large disk. I am guessing you would want to go with something larger than the typical 512. For Linux FSes, they all use 4096 on disks larger than a few megs (ext2, ext3, ext4, XFS).

AFAIK == As Far As I Know :)

Sorry about the confusion, did not pick up on the Afaik mnemonic since it was not on caps. So, I'll look at PFS3 and also FFS.

Ive setup my last two drives with SFS and have found the performance much better than FFS :)