A4000 or A1200 ?

[diablothe2nd]

it is:

Asus A8N SLI Deluxe
AMD Althon 64 x2 2.2Ghz
Nvidia 6200MX

200gb IDE hd
IDE dvd drive

I've turned the Sata controllers off

i'll try removing 1gb of ram to see if that makes a difference.

I have a nasty feeling the 64bit part is where my story will end as i didnt see anything about it on the support page. it does run 32 os'es fine though

[diablothe2nd]

nope, black screen with 1gb ram too.

EDIT

I see the logo and booting dots .....

after that, it's black and the cd drive spins down.

[fishyfish]

Nah, there's no probs about it being 64bit. As I mentioned Ive run it on athlon64's before and even newer hardware (currently using a core2duo@3.86ghz with amithlon).

Another common problem is to do with harddrive modes. See if there's a legacy option in the bios.

edit: ahh, just noticed youre using a gf6200, that's the most likely cause. You'll need to update the kernel to use it, which mens you'll need to boot from harddrive to begin with (which is a step I hoped to avoid helping you with until you'd had it booting).
If you want to persist though Im still happy to help. It's well worth the effort in my opinion.
Do you have onboard graphics on that board and/or an old pci gfx card? Will make things a little easier to begin with.

[diablothe2nd]

okeydoke.

ummm i better ask a silly question though, should the disc that you linked on PB be able to boot itself so i can install? like you would with a linux livecd or windows?

[diablothe2nd]

just saw your edit. as we're both watching this thread i think double posting should be allowed temporarily

i MAY have an old 2mb S3 Virge card kicking around somewhere. will need to dig through heaps of old pc stock

[diablothe2nd]

just had a route around... i think i binned it.

Found an old ATI rage Pro 128, but from being moved so many times it's lost a cap so that's out of the question.

[diablothe2nd]

this may be too modern, but in my other pc (the one i'm currently typing on) I have an AMD 5870 and a 6870. Would they work temporarily?

[fishyfish]

Yeah, it should live boot, but the kernel contained on the cd/iso has been updated over the years, and unfortunately the one on the cd is a bit too old to live boot on some hardware that's newer than amithlon. In such cases you'll need to do the stuff that some people find offputting. Not that it's difficult, but seems to be a little different than what a lot of people are comfortable with.

Let me know when/if you find an older pci card and how that goes and I'll help you from there.
I could run you through it now, but being that it often turns people off to get swamped by "new" things I'll take it one step at a time

Ive found that I tend to end up having to go over stuff a few times when I give too much info at once as well, which is another reason Id prefer to take it a bit slower.

Unless you'd prefer I just dump it all on you now?

[fishyfish]

As for the newer cards, cant hurt to try
Ive found that some newer card will work (in vesa) still with the original kernel (the one on the cd/iso).

[diablothe2nd]

dump me in the deep end mate

I've had plenty of headaches with linux so am used to convaluted ways of getting things to work

I aint scared of no shell

[fishyfish]

Sorry for the delay, my internet went down after my last post.
Anyway,........

First thing is you'll need to create a small fat partition to hold the amithlon files/kernel. Personally I just used a win98 boot cd (just the contents of a floppy, but I put it on cd cos I have no floppy drive), but freedos works too apparently. 50meg is more than big enough (5-10 meg probably is enough, but I made mine 50meg). Copy the contents of the isolinux directory from the amithlon disc here. You'll also need a new amithlon kernel. I use kernel3.10, but kernel4 is also available. You'll also need to edit either the "amithlon" or "small" script to point to the new kernel (just change the 1st word in the script to the name of the new kernel and increase both ramdisk and leavepages a little too, 20% increase should be more than enough). Im not infront of that machine at the moment, but if I recall correctly its "emubox.gz" thats at the start of the script by default that needs to be changed.

After that's done you'll need to create an amithlonvirtualdisk (essentially the "harddrive" for amigaos). To do this I live booted an AROS cd and used aroses hdtoolbox. There's a type there called amithlonvirtualdisk (type76). A harddrive cant be both mbr and rdb, so you need to do this if youre using the one harddrive. You can use 2 drives as well, one to boot from and one amiga drive, but its not necessary.

You can also prepare/partition the drive/virtualamithlondisk from aroses hdtoolbox if you like.

Once this is all done you just need to create an autoexec.bat file that contains:
cd c:\isolinux
loadlin @scriptname

(scriptname being the name of the editted "amithlon" or "small" script you editted earlier).

That's the main of it, give it a try and see what happens. Most likely (hopefully) you'll get either an amigashell or the kickstart insert disk screen after that.

From there its just a matter of installing amigaos. You'll probably need to extract os3.9 to the amigaos side sys: partition from aros seeing as youve not been able to boot from the amithlon cd.

All being right in the world that should be it. It's 2am here at the moment and Im going by memory so its not impossible Ive missed something, but hopefully there's enough info there to give you the idea.

Feel free to ask if it doesnt go to plan or if there's something you'd like clarified.

[diablothe2nd]

okeydoke, that all sounds simple enough.

I may take a peek inside the livecd iso and see if i can change those files and re burn the disc... that way i wont need to faff around and just bung the disc in should i need to in the future

[fishyfish]

Yeah, that'd probably be ideal, but I tend to have problems chaging contents of livebooting cds/isos and having them still work, so I didnt suggest it. Im sure it can be done, I just cant really give much advice there, so opted for what has worked for me in the past

Anyway, good luck, and I'll be interested to hear how you go. While (win)uae is an impressive piece of software a lot of people who have a "serious" interest in amigaos and its software (apart from old games) find it hard to go back to winuae after using amithlon. To this day its still my favorite amiga system besides commodore 68k machines.

[diablothe2nd]

managed to find a link to a newer iso from Amiga.org, this one has a nice grub options list and i found one for kernel4 that worked! w00t!

i'm in the process of installing it now

interestinly, all options on the list worked, but the ones without a HD produced a scrambled insert disk animation (purple screen). I guess the frequency wasn't nice for my monitor.

[diablothe2nd]

Hmmm, it says in the guide to use 76 as a partition type (and comments on how good or bad the software is if it doesn't have it) interestingly the partitioning software that comes on the Amithlon disc doesn't have 76! LOL

trying to find a partitioner using a linux live disc that does

[fishyfish]

Ive always used an aros live booting cd + aros hdtoolbox for creating a type76 (amithlonvirtualdisk) partition, so if all else fails you could always use that.

Glad to hear youre making progress though, and again, feel free to ask if you need any help.
Off the top of my head though a couple of things that are handy to know about are:
Apply the amithlonupdate archives (on aminet I believe). Theyre just a few bugfixes, driver updates etc.
If youve got the ram to spare, it doesnt hurt to change the cpu cache size to 64meg (its 16 by default). It's set in the startup-sequence.
If you have problems with slow harddrive access/lack of dma there's a tool called setdma that's contained in the kernel3 archive (iirc) that can "force" dma, which makes a huge difference. It's quite simple to use and there's docs provided.
Use amiga side drivers when possible.
Probably a few other things Im not remembering

edit: ah, thinking about it the amithlon updates could already have been applied with the version you found via amiga.org. I managed to get an original version not long after it was released so never tried any of the editted versions.
Not exactly scientific, but chances are if graphics move smoothly updates have been applied (there's some vesa stuff in there that's missing without the updates).

[diablothe2nd]

i just partitioned and formatted the spare space on my hd with SFS via aros.

the drives aren't showing up in the Amithlon live boot though :/

methinks i need to load an SFS driver

[diablothe2nd]

hmmm okay more info:

I've installed the "boot" stuff to the first partition (30mb FAT), sorted grub and it boots as it should.

In Aros I created a 1gb SFS partition (System) and 4gb SFS (Work) which were validated and i formatted them.

should i now be booting from that to install, or should i still be using the livecd? as i'm not seeing the devices/partitions from the livecd


EDIT nope, n ot showing in the version on hard drive either

EDIT 2 - checking assign from the cli also shows no extra devices like DH0 DH1 etc. nor do they show up in early boot options (both mouse buttons at boot)

[fishyfish]

Ah sorry, I probably wasnt clear.
I only make the type &076/amithlonvirtualdisk (or virtualamithlondisk, cant recall what it calls it) partition in AROS. Once that is done and saved reboot using the amithlon cd and then use os3.9 hdtoolbox to partition the virtualamithlondisk as you like (amigaos sees it as its own harddrive, dont touch the physical harddrive in os3.9 hdtoolbox, just the one labelled amithlonvirtualdisk. You can partition it as you like, apart from boot partition which can be no larger than 4gig. For some reason though disks sometimes detect as incorrect size with amithlon, so if it doesnt match you'll need to edit the drives geometry manually. Hopefully you wont encounter that though.

From there you'll need to install OS3.9 with the installer. Once its installed to harddrive you need to add pfs3 or sfs (whichever you prefer) and you can change the filesystem in use by your partitions.
Id never actually partitioned the drive with aros sfs, so not sure if it works. I guess it'll show up once you install the file system to amigaos if its going to (assuming you dont have to repartition your drive of course).

Oh, and backtracking a little, that kickstart insert disk purple screen is always kinda garbled. Probably trying to display it at 15khz I guess. That said though I was able to make a 320x200/256 and 360x288 screenmodes with p96mode, which comes in handy for some amiga stuff and assorted retro emulators

[diablothe2nd]

I'm confused.

I've got 2 very different guides, and you all saying different things! lol

none of them i've been able to follow to the letter because of my setup. the guides included on the disc imply sharing the pc with XP, which i'm not. i have no floppy drive either so the grub on floppy wont work.

there are these zips that are spoken about that i only recently managed to find lol. although they never got used because of this new iso i've found, that completely writes off the guides althogether! lol.

i have the 30mb fat partition with grub and it's able to boot into the hdd preinstalled version without the livecd. which i think is a good step!

now i can't for the life of me figure out what i need to do with the rest of the drive. I'm not quite understanding what you are saying either.

Is the amithlonvirtualdisk a physical partition on the drive with the label "amithlonvirtualdisk"? because partition type 76 is AFFS is mentioned in the guide so i assume that's where Amithlon will read from once it's booted the contents of the 1st 32mb partition.

or is this virtual disk an image file to be hosted on the fat partition?