Booting an A1200 from internal HDD.
 

Just got an A1200 and after swapping the wonky FDD with one from an A600 it is booting some disks now. However there is an 80MB IBM HDD inside the A1200 with three partitions on it. They are Workbench, Work and ASM. The Workbench partition seems to have everything on it to run but will only boot to a AmigaDOS window.
Sysinfo will run from there though.

Any ideas how to make this drive bootable. It's worth mentioning that I cannot use my Workbench floppys as they seem to have errors.

I have a spare FDD but it's going to need modded to work with the Amiga and I'm not sure when I'm going to get time to do it.

And I don't have a PC either.

You should check if there is s:startup-sequence. And loadwb endcli could bring you onto the workbench.

To view the Startup-sequence from the AmiaDos window type: ed s:startup-sequence.

Type: 'LoadWB'. workbench should load, but it's only temporary solution.

I've just bought an IDE adaptor and CF card to replace the HDD. Hopefully that will allow me just to boot from the CF card most of the time and not require to use the FDD much.

You will need workbench disks to install onto that new setup.
Your problem description seems to hint to a healthy hard drive. You might have a wrong version of Workbench installed or files might have just gotten corrupted by any reason among which it could be a virus.

Have you tried any of the suggestions people have given you on this thread?
You will still need an FDD for games unless you use whdload installs (which you can use on your current hard drive anyway :P)

Me too... I just entered this forum after 'fooling around on eBay' and suffered a brain hemorrhage that made me the proude owner of 2 x A500 and 2 x A1200.
It's been a long time since I have had an Amiga between my filthy hands (late 1990).
Back in those days 'we' had WB 1.2/1.3 to boot the goddamn 'thing' and IF you were rich you also had a ½ Mb RAM expansion (stinking rich an extra floppy drive a well).
CD-ROM, HD and so on, was a no-no-land.

Ever since I sold that machine, my thoughts always returned to either that or my beloved C=64.

For 20 years (or so) I have sailed around on a raft with Gill Bates (YES he's a p***y) and his dubious Windows OS. Then some 3 weeks ago, I jumped back to the future and now I'm sitting here, feeling a bit 'lost', because I've never handled a HD on an Amiga nor these famours *.ADF files, everybody is talking about.

Where to start (HD first then *.ADF) ?

PS.

Shopping list from eBay:

1 pcs A 500 (plain)
1 pcs A 500 with 1 Mb RAM and kickswitch for KS 1.2/1.3
1 pcs A 1200, 84 Mb HD (expansion board is on its way)
1 pcs A 1200, 4Gb CF HDD, Blizzard 1230 MK4 w/128MB RAM, 3.1 Rom V40.68
1 pcs PCMCIA with an 8 Gb CF SanDisk Ultra II card
1 pcs 4 Gb CF with IDE controller WB 2.1
1 pcs 4 Gb CF with IDE controller WB 3.1
1 pcs 4 Gb CF with IDE controller Dual boot 3.1 & Sys 4 AGA
2 pcs Action Replay Mk I and Mk III
and a proper pile of floppys.

(Did I mention that I had a brain hemorrhage?)


PPS:

Never mind the *.ADF, coz I found this:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ypT_H-Dg3bs
http://eab.abime.net/showthread.php?t=37924
http://eab.abime.net/showthread.php?t=35434
http://eab.abime.net/showthread.php?t=27704

;)

Those links I stole here:

http://eab.abime.net/showpost.php?p=786554&postcount=8

and here:

http://eab.abime.net/showpost.php?p=787649&postcount=13

Oh My God, everybody went off for the holidays. Now lets see what's going to happen after new year.

Happy New Year my follow Amiga freaks :)

Thanks for the all the advice guys. I've been too busy between work and festive stuff to do anything with the Amiga. I have just received a CF card and adaptor and have a scart cable on the way now as well.

I got my scart cable for the A1200 today. After inserting the 4GB CF card and adaptor I now have a fully functional Amiga with a large library of games. It is impressive how quick the games load bearing in mind the age of the machine. Sysinfo reports that the CF card is being read at a whole 2MB per second! When you think back to how long it took to load 700 and odd kilobytes from a floppy disk this feels almost cartridge quick.

So looking forward to playing SWIV, X-out and Rodland again.