Workbench 1.3 on Amiga 3000

hth313 · 04 July 2018, 08:06

I am trying to get Workbench 1.3 installed on my A3000 with 1.4 ROM, but it does not go so well.

First I tried to add a WB_1.3 partition, but it was located around 4GB offset, so I reorganized a bit and got it to around 1.7GB offset, as FFS does not seem allow too large offsets.

I had a hard time getting the system to even come up showing this partition, but after temporarily renaming the device name, I managed to format it. Then I copied the WB and Extras to it and the 1.3 kickstart with bonus. Finally I renamed it back to WB_1.3.

Time for a cold boot with both buttons down and shows up among the boot alternatives. However, booting from it comes up with "Not a DOS disk in device WB_1.3" requester.

Do I need to use OFS for this or what is up?

When booting to 3.1, the WB_1.3 device does not show up at all. I assume this is intentional, but I find it annoying.

zipper · 04 July 2018, 10:50

OFS is miserable and good to just about 52 MB afair. I think you need 1.3 FFS.

Jope · 04 July 2018, 13:20

The bonus hides the OS's partition for the other kickstart when you boot from the hard disk. IIRC they are all visible if you boot from a floppy.

FFS should be fine, but it can't be too new.

hth313 · 05 July 2018, 08:20

My 1.3 partition is 41MB and I have not loaded any FFS apart from the default one. I do not know if that means that it takes it from the current kickstart or something else.

I read somewhere that the boot partition has to be within the first 512MB, which was not what I had. That is the cause of the not a DOS disk which occurs when it tries to load the kickstart it seems. After reorganizing the partitions and making it such, it can now load the 1.3 kickstart, but complains that the 1.3 partition is Not a DOS disk in unit 6.

At this point I can boot from a floppy with Workbench 1.3. The system comes up in version 34 and the PFS partitions actually get mounted. The WB_2.x is hidden as mentioned and WB_1.3 is still not a DOS disk.

I then tried to use a later FFS as an updated file system on the HD, but with same result.

Not sure what to try next?

Jope · 05 July 2018, 10:14

Do you have some version of FFS on the RDB in addition to PFS3?

KS1.3 doesn't have a resident FFS, so one must be present on the RDB.

hth313 · 06 July 2018, 02:48

Quote:

Originally Posted by Jope

Do you have some version of FFS on the RDB in addition to PFS3?

KS1.3 doesn't have a resident FFS, so one must be present on the RDB.

Yes, that was the problem. Or rather, I added a later one but it did not work, then I went with FFS 36.x from 2.04 and that worked after I fixed the DOS type.

It is not all easy to read the DOS type (greyed out hex string) and when loading FFS to RDB it gets DOS\3 (03 in the end), which is international FFS. I had tried to get it as vanilla as possible in an attempt to avoid issues. It worked after I ticked International for that partition to get the numbers to match.

Now it boots into 1.3 from HD!!

Oh well, after playing with it a little, there are things to do here, that is for sure.

Here are some random observations so far.

I get two icons for the WB_1.3 partition, one has the volume name and the icon I borrowed from 3.1. The other has a 1.3 style floppy icon and is named something like DOSC (with the C inverse), I guess it picked the DOS type string here. No idea why it came up, but it is easy to ignore.

I tried AS225 with Sana-2, but it complained that I did not set the hostname. Very odd, probably some other error not being reported properly. I will try more with this later, it would be good to get networking up.

Amiga Basic (the one from Microsoft) could start, but trying a simple 'print' with some arguments tend to just print some 'y' with dots above.

Before it worked I booted from floppy I tried to format the WB_1.3 partition (while running 1.3), but that did not work as it reported out of memory. Well I guess 41MB (HD) is larger than 12MB (internal memory), but...

So far I have not had any visits from Mr Guru, oh I so miss him, he sadly never made it to 3.1...

Anyway, it was a fun experience to have the blue, white and orange WB 1.3 up again and get the Zzz... wait icon and loads of old stuff. I will try dig out some classical demos for it later.

This makes my machine dual boot! Now I start to got the itch to make it triple boot with Amiga UNIX, is that available?

mray · 06 July 2018, 04:32

HTH I remembered reading this and from what I think you are saying that
dos3 can be used (international) and it seem that DOSC you report, could mean C=3

You *cannot* bootstrap from hard disk drives that are
formatted with the international flavours of these filing systems or with
the directory caching filing system

The make superkickstart also mentions that. It will create a SK disk with the 3KS
files onto the new disk (1.3,2.x,3.1)
Great work ! I hope to follow in your footsteps
Mike

Noth · 06 July 2018, 10:59

Quote:

Originally Posted by hth313

This makes my machine dual boot! Now I start to got the itch to make it triple boot with Amiga UNIX, is that available?

You can check out the Amiga Unix section of this forum, you'll find all the resources there.

hth313 · 08 July 2018, 07:05

In case someone comes here in the future wondering how you get hold of the 1.3 kickstart with bonus for A3000, this is for you.

Kickstarts for both 1.3 and 2.04 are on the Kickstart floppy from Commodore. Normally the installation script will just extract the 2.04 kickstart.

On the 2.04 Install floppy you will find tools/Makefiles which is the program that extracts the kickstart image. Run it with a ? to see the arguments. It wants the floppy drive, kickstart variant and destination file.

On a 3.1 Install floppy you will find c/ExtractKickstart which performs the same duty.

The 1.3 superkickstart has a larger bonus section compared to the ones for 2.04 (and later). This is because it also contains the scsi.device which is not present in a 1.3 kickstart.

While it has scsi.device in the bonus part, it does not have FFS. As mentioned above, to boot 1.3 it must have FFS in the RDB of the HD. It can actually load the 1.3 kickstart without that, as the 1.4 kickstart which does that has FFS. However, when 1.3 takes over, it must load FFS from the RDB in order to boot.

Jope · 09 July 2018, 17:07

The original disk set included with the early A3000s has six disks.
- kickstart
- install
- wb1.3.2
- extras 1.3
- wb 2.0
- extras 2.0

The install disk has PrepHD, FormatHD and InstallHD scripts.

PrepHD makes the partitions for WB_1.3, WB_2.x and Work,

Code:

addpart WB_2.x: 6M bootable 1 dostype 0x444f5301 buffers 30 mask 0xFFFFFFFc
addpart WB_1.3: 2M bootable 0 dostype 0x444f5301 buffers 30 mask 0xFFFFFFFc
addpart Work: rest dostype 0x444f5301 buffers 30 mask 0xFFFFFFFc
readfs l:fastfilesystem version 2 dostype 0x444f5301

FormatHD formats them (System1.3, System2.0 and Work)

Code:

format <NIL: >NIL: drive WB_2.x: name System2.0 quick
format <NIL: >NIL: drive WB_1.3: name System1.3 quick
format <NIL: >NIL: drive Work: name Work quick

and InstallHD copies the contents of the WB1.3 and 2.0 disks into the correct places, along with the correct kick images.

Code:

echo "Copying 2.0 Kickstart Disk Image."
ram:tools/MakeFiles df0: 2.0 WB_2.x:devs/kickstart
echo "*NPress return to copy 1.3 Kickstart Disk Image."
ram:tools/MakeFiles >NIL: df0: 1.3 WB_1.3:devs/kickstart

The KS/WB 2.0 inclulded here were older than 2.04.

hth313 · 09 July 2018, 20:04

@Jope

Very interesting, thanks for sharing!

I do not have those disks, and I do not think I ever had them. I think my A3000 came with 2.04 but with 1.4 kickstart installed. Probably it was built as a pre-2.04 machine and later 2.04 was added before sent to end customer (me). I think I had extra memory (and maybe a larger HD) installed by the dealer too.

So they probably should have installed the 2.04 ROMs in my machine, but did not do that. I have a hunch that I was a bit disappointed back then, due to that it had softkick and I also had to get this 030 machine as I remembered trying to wait out for 040 machines...

Today, I am actually very happy it has 1.4 and that it is an A3000 as they are so well built. But I remember that it was not the machine I really wanted to buy at that point.

I used original WB 1.3.2 Sweden/Finland for Amiga 500/2000 and Extras 1.3 International for my 1.3 partition. They were most likely from an upgrade I bought for my A2000 (or A500, cannot remember which). Are there differences between a 1.3.2 for A3000 and the ones for A500/A2000?

Jope · 09 July 2018, 20:33

Seems to me, like the only actual difference is in the setclock binary, which the install disk copies from itself to the WB partition after all the files have been copied.

The installer also copies the aforementioned makefiles command and related update scripts into a Tools directory for updating the superkick file as new ones were released. There is also a videoadjust directory located in Tools, which has a few test pictures for adjusting the flicker fixer's trimmer.

hth313 · 10 July 2018, 08:31

That could explain why it says it can't find the clock during boot. However, copying the SetClock from 2.04 or 3.1 to C: causes it to stop with an error during boot instead.

The videoadjust directory is also on the 2.04 install floppy. The files use a tool Display which I do not seem to have.

Jope · 10 July 2018, 21:07

This might help. Display lives in sys:utilities

hth313 · 11 July 2018, 07:27

@Jope

Many thanks, that could care of the SetClock problem I had.

mray · 12 July 2018, 19:32

Quote:

Originally Posted by Jope

The original disk set included with the early A3000s has six disks.
- kickstart
- install
- wb1.3.2
- extras 1.3
- wb 2.0
- extras 2.0

The install disk has PrepHD, FormatHD and InstallHD scripts.

PrepHD makes the partitions for WB_1.3, WB_2.x and Work,

Code:

addpart WB_2.x: 6M bootable 1 dostype 0x444f5301 buffers 30 mask 0xFFFFFFFc
addpart WB_1.3: 2M bootable 0 dostype 0x444f5301 buffers 30 mask 0xFFFFFFFc
addpart Work: rest dostype 0x444f5301 buffers 30 mask 0xFFFFFFFc
readfs l:fastfilesystem version 2 dostype 0x444f5301

FormatHD formats them (System1.3, System2.0 and Work)

Code:

format <NIL: >NIL: drive WB_2.x: name System2.0 quick
format <NIL: >NIL: drive WB_1.3: name System1.3 quick
format <NIL: >NIL: drive Work: name Work quick

and InstallHD copies the contents of the WB1.3 and 2.0 disks into the correct places, along with the correct kick images.

Code:

echo "Copying 2.0 Kickstart Disk Image."
ram:tools/MakeFiles df0: 2.0 WB_2.x:devs/kickstart
echo "*NPress return to copy 1.3 Kickstart Disk Image."
ram:tools/MakeFiles >NIL: df0: 1.3 WB_1.3:devs/kickstart

The KS/WB 2.0 inclulded here were older than 2.04.

Jope
I have followed your posts with HTH much interest. So I was wondering
If you would know of a site that might have for download the early disks
that you refer to in this post? i have looked and have not located a site.
So I was thinking that you might know of one and be able to share that
information.
Thank You
for your time
Mike

rhester72 · 16 August 2018, 00:17

One question I have - when booting a 1990-era SuperKickstart A3000 that was factory-loaded from Commodore and entering 1.3 via boot menu, did it present as Workbench 1.3.2 or 1.3.3?

TjLaZer · 16 August 2018, 03:56

Workbench will have those different version #'s, not Kickstart 1.3

Jope · 16 August 2018, 09:19

Quote:

Originally Posted by rhester72

One question I have - when booting a 1990-era SuperKickstart A3000 that was factory-loaded from Commodore and entering 1.3 via boot menu, did it present as Workbench 1.3.2 or 1.3.3?

The disks supplied with mine are 1.3.2, so at least some of them shipped before 1.3.3 was out (or perhaps they decided to include the older version for some reason).

Firestone · 22 October 2019, 20:44

Very interesting to read everything about the early A3000s with superkickstart, Jope. Thanks for all the details.

I got one of the early A3000s myself, and right now I'm trying to reexperience the days when I installed the dualboot system that came with the A3000 and Superkickstart.
I have working dual boot 1.3 and 3.1.4 on my A3000 right now, but I'm going to do a clean install on a sepparate HD now just for fun.

The only problem is that I don't have the original disks that came with this machine anymore. I guess it must have been the same versions as you describe, Jope.

Were the install-disk the only difference between the A3000 diskset and for example A500/A2000 ? I can't remember if I have seen any disks marked with "A3000 Workbench 1.3.2" or "A3000 Extras 1.3" and so on.

Are there any places I can get/buy these original install-disks? The seem to be incredible hard to find these days.

It seems like that there were two versions of the original Superkickstart-disks. Version 36.143 (2.0) and version 37.175 (2.04) with 1.3 as the second kickstart.
But what happened later? Did Commodore supply all later versions as ROMs, or did they actually continue to support the superkickstart-rom?
I know that it's possible to add the bonuscode to later versions, but was that the official way to do it?

04 July 2018, 08:06	#1
hth313 Registered User Join Date: May 2018 Location: Delta, Canada Posts: 192	Workbench 1.3 on Amiga 3000 I am trying to get Workbench 1.3 installed on my A3000 with 1.4 ROM, but it does not go so well. First I tried to add a WB_1.3 partition, but it was located around 4GB offset, so I reorganized a bit and got it to around 1.7GB offset, as FFS does not seem allow too large offsets. I had a hard time getting the system to even come up showing this partition, but after temporarily renaming the device name, I managed to format it. Then I copied the WB and Extras to it and the 1.3 kickstart with bonus. Finally I renamed it back to WB_1.3. Time for a cold boot with both buttons down and shows up among the boot alternatives. However, booting from it comes up with "Not a DOS disk in device WB_1.3" requester. Do I need to use OFS for this or what is up? When booting to 3.1, the WB_1.3 device does not show up at all. I assume this is intentional, but I find it annoying.

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04 July 2018, 10:50	#2
zipper Registered User Join Date: Mar 2004 Location: finland Posts: 1,837	OFS is miserable and good to just about 52 MB afair. I think you need 1.3 FFS.

04 July 2018, 13:20	#3
Jope - Join Date: Jul 2003 Location: Helsinki / Finland Age: 43 Posts: 9,861	The bonus hides the OS's partition for the other kickstart when you boot from the hard disk. IIRC they are all visible if you boot from a floppy. FFS should be fine, but it can't be too new.

05 July 2018, 08:20	#4
hth313 Registered User Join Date: May 2018 Location: Delta, Canada Posts: 192	My 1.3 partition is 41MB and I have not loaded any FFS apart from the default one. I do not know if that means that it takes it from the current kickstart or something else. I read somewhere that the boot partition has to be within the first 512MB, which was not what I had. That is the cause of the not a DOS disk which occurs when it tries to load the kickstart it seems. After reorganizing the partitions and making it such, it can now load the 1.3 kickstart, but complains that the 1.3 partition is Not a DOS disk in unit 6. At this point I can boot from a floppy with Workbench 1.3. The system comes up in version 34 and the PFS partitions actually get mounted. The WB_2.x is hidden as mentioned and WB_1.3 is still not a DOS disk. I then tried to use a later FFS as an updated file system on the HD, but with same result. Not sure what to try next?

05 July 2018, 10:14	#5
Jope - Join Date: Jul 2003 Location: Helsinki / Finland Age: 43 Posts: 9,861	Do you have some version of FFS on the RDB in addition to PFS3? KS1.3 doesn't have a resident FFS, so one must be present on the RDB.

06 July 2018, 04:32	#7
mray Registered User Join Date: Dec 2017 Location: cypress tx usa Posts: 42	HTH I remembered reading this and from what I think you are saying that dos3 can be used (international) and it seem that DOSC you report, could mean C=3 You cannot bootstrap from hard disk drives that are formatted with the international flavours of these filing systems or with the directory caching filing system The make superkickstart also mentions that. It will create a SK disk with the 3KS files onto the new disk (1.3,2.x,3.1) Great work ! I hope to follow in your footsteps Mike

08 July 2018, 07:05	#9
hth313 Registered User Join Date: May 2018 Location: Delta, Canada Posts: 192	In case someone comes here in the future wondering how you get hold of the 1.3 kickstart with bonus for A3000, this is for you. Kickstarts for both 1.3 and 2.04 are on the Kickstart floppy from Commodore. Normally the installation script will just extract the 2.04 kickstart. On the 2.04 Install floppy you will find tools/Makefiles which is the program that extracts the kickstart image. Run it with a ? to see the arguments. It wants the floppy drive, kickstart variant and destination file. On a 3.1 Install floppy you will find c/ExtractKickstart which performs the same duty. The 1.3 superkickstart has a larger bonus section compared to the ones for 2.04 (and later). This is because it also contains the scsi.device which is not present in a 1.3 kickstart. While it has scsi.device in the bonus part, it does not have FFS. As mentioned above, to boot 1.3 it must have FFS in the RDB of the HD. It can actually load the 1.3 kickstart without that, as the 1.4 kickstart which does that has FFS. However, when 1.3 takes over, it must load FFS from the RDB in order to boot.

09 July 2018, 20:04	#11
hth313 Registered User Join Date: May 2018 Location: Delta, Canada Posts: 192	@Jope Very interesting, thanks for sharing! I do not have those disks, and I do not think I ever had them. I think my A3000 came with 2.04 but with 1.4 kickstart installed. Probably it was built as a pre-2.04 machine and later 2.04 was added before sent to end customer (me). I think I had extra memory (and maybe a larger HD) installed by the dealer too. So they probably should have installed the 2.04 ROMs in my machine, but did not do that. I have a hunch that I was a bit disappointed back then, due to that it had softkick and I also had to get this 030 machine as I remembered trying to wait out for 040 machines... Today, I am actually very happy it has 1.4 and that it is an A3000 as they are so well built. But I remember that it was not the machine I really wanted to buy at that point. I used original WB 1.3.2 Sweden/Finland for Amiga 500/2000 and Extras 1.3 International for my 1.3 partition. They were most likely from an upgrade I bought for my A2000 (or A500, cannot remember which). Are there differences between a 1.3.2 for A3000 and the ones for A500/A2000?

09 July 2018, 20:33	#12
Jope - Join Date: Jul 2003 Location: Helsinki / Finland Age: 43 Posts: 9,861	Seems to me, like the only actual difference is in the setclock binary, which the install disk copies from itself to the WB partition after all the files have been copied. The installer also copies the aforementioned makefiles command and related update scripts into a Tools directory for updating the superkick file as new ones were released. There is also a videoadjust directory located in Tools, which has a few test pictures for adjusting the flicker fixer's trimmer.

10 July 2018, 08:31	#13
hth313 Registered User Join Date: May 2018 Location: Delta, Canada Posts: 192	That could explain why it says it can't find the clock during boot. However, copying the SetClock from 2.04 or 3.1 to C: causes it to stop with an error during boot instead. The videoadjust directory is also on the 2.04 install floppy. The files use a tool Display which I do not seem to have.

11 July 2018, 07:27	#15
hth313 Registered User Join Date: May 2018 Location: Delta, Canada Posts: 192	@Jope Many thanks, that could care of the SetClock problem I had.

16 August 2018, 00:17	#17
rhester72 Registered User Join Date: Feb 2008 Location: New York / USA Posts: 360	One question I have - when booting a 1990-era SuperKickstart A3000 that was factory-loaded from Commodore and entering 1.3 via boot menu, did it present as Workbench 1.3.2 or 1.3.3?

16 August 2018, 03:56	#18
TjLaZer Registered User Join Date: Sep 2004 Location: Tacoma, WA USA Age: 52 Posts: 1,915	Workbench will have those different version #'s, not Kickstart 1.3

22 October 2019, 20:44	#20
Firestone Registered User Join Date: Apr 2013 Location: Norway Posts: 249	Very interesting to read everything about the early A3000s with superkickstart, Jope. Thanks for all the details. I got one of the early A3000s myself, and right now I'm trying to reexperience the days when I installed the dualboot system that came with the A3000 and Superkickstart. I have working dual boot 1.3 and 3.1.4 on my A3000 right now, but I'm going to do a clean install on a sepparate HD now just for fun. The only problem is that I don't have the original disks that came with this machine anymore. I guess it must have been the same versions as you describe, Jope. Were the install-disk the only difference between the A3000 diskset and for example A500/A2000 ? I can't remember if I have seen any disks marked with "A3000 Workbench 1.3.2" or "A3000 Extras 1.3" and so on. Are there any places I can get/buy these original install-disks? The seem to be incredible hard to find these days. It seems like that there were two versions of the original Superkickstart-disks. Version 36.143 (2.0) and version 37.175 (2.04) with 1.3 as the second kickstart. But what happened later? Did Commodore supply all later versions as ROMs, or did they actually continue to support the superkickstart-rom? I know that it's possible to add the bonuscode to later versions, but was that the official way to do it?

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