Project Amiga

Last weekend I had the good fortune to pick up a Commodore Amiga 1200 with Commodore 1084S colour monitor from a car boot sale for the princely sum of £5. The computer and monitor both worked well enough, so naturally the next thing to do was take the 1200 apart!

My plan was to install a 2.5" 1.2Gb laptop drive that I have lying around into the Amiga. This drive is no use to man nor beast when fitted to a PC nowadays, but in the Amiga 1.2Gb is plenty for a Workbench 3.0 install and a bunch of apps/games. The little metal cradle that the drive fits to was present inside, but not the 44-pin cable necessary to connect the drive to the Amiga's IDE interface, so it was onto eBay to buy one (£3.48).

While waiting for this to arrive I've been thinking about how to actually go about installing Workbench. When I had my original A1200, it was a hard disk model with a 20Mb(!) drive installed. Of course this had Workbench on it already, so I have no experience of actually installing it myself. I had used CrossDOS to get files between Amiga and PC on a 720Kb MS-DOS formatted disk, but this was before the days of emulation and ADF images so I have no experience of getting an ADF image from the PC to a real disk on the Amiga.

In readiness I've borrowed some Workbench disks from a friend who still has his A1200, however his is not a hard disk model and does not include the Install disk - just the 5 other disks (Workbench, Extras, Storage, Locale and Fonts). I read somewhere that the HDD tools are on the Extras disk, so I might be able to partition and format the drive in the Amiga using that. Then, to install Workbench it may be possible to simply copy the relevant files from the floppies to the right location on the HDD.

I then started reading about a feature in WinUAE that allows you to mount a real Amiga hard drive inside the emulator. As I have an IDE to USB adaptor for my PC, I can simply connect the 1.2Gb drive to the PC, mount it in WinUAE and install Workbench from there. Experimenting with WinUAE however revealed a problem - the "Add Hard Drive" button was greyed out. More reading and I found that WinUAE must be started with the -disableharddrivesafetycheck parameter, otherwise the emulator refuses to look at any drive that has an existing partition. I went to the command line and launched WinUAE with this parameter, but it made no difference. It turns out that you must also run WinUAE as administrator, so you need to be running your CLI as administrator or create a shortcut to WinUAE and right-click "Run as administrator".

The only thing I haven't figured out is how I will actually copy ADF images (or indeed any files) from my PC to the newly formatted Amiga hard drive. I will have to investigate how to get files from the PC's local file system to the attached Amiga HDD...