Dual boot?

[Lektroid]

Is it possible to dual boot between 3.2.x and OS4 (or any other Amiga OS)?


I like 3.2.x for a number of reasons, but have recently found one of my most loved games will only run on OS4?

[trixster]

It’s possible. I dual boot 1.3 and 3.1 on my A500 with ACA500+. I can’t recall the steps offhand, but I believe Mrs Mad Lemon made a video about it.

[derSammler]

You can select the boot device in the early startup menu. So there's not much to it. Install one version on partition 1, another version on partition 2. When you want to boot the second one, just make it the boot device in the early startup menu.

[Daedalus]

Yep, the early startup menu is the most direct way to do it. You have to be careful though with installations of the OS that load modules from the hard drive and reboot to activate them, because these will then try to boot from the default partition once their modules are loaded unless you catch it and go to the early startup menu again to choose the same partition. Depending on the ROM version, this can happen with 3.2, and can even be the case with 3.1 and earlier if using fast ROM tools or loading new scsi.device drivers for example.

There are a couple of alternative approaches. One is to use a tool to change the boot priority of the various partitions (e.g. changebootpri by Thomas Rapp), which will make the desired OS partition the default. Another more involved method is to use some scripting in the default partition's startup-sequence to redirect booting to the relevant partition based on current Kickstart version. This will let you choose a partition in the early startup menu and then any reboots with resident modules will automatically boot from the correct partition.

[derSammler]

Or maybe without the need of any tools: simply use HDToolBox to toggle the "bootable" flag. If you only have two OS versions, say on DH0: and DH1:, you only ever have to toggle the flag for DH0: to choose between the two.

But of course, you can go more complex ways with that. Depends on how your desired setting would look like.

[AMIGASYSTEM]

Originally Posted by Lektroid

Is it possible to dual boot between 3.2.x and OS4 (or any other Amiga OS)?


I like 3.2.x for a number of reasons, but have recently found one of my most loved games will only run on OS4?

Which Amiga model are you using ? or are we talking about Emulation ?

[Daedalus]

Originally Posted by derSammler

Or maybe without the need of any tools: simply use HDToolBox to toggle the "bootable" flag.

HDToolbox is a tool, just a different one and less convenient for putting in a little icon-driven script to make the changes.

[daxb]

Originally Posted by Daedalus

HDToolbox is a tool, just a different one and less convenient for putting in a little icon-driven script to make the changes.

This. I just wanted to write the same. HDToolbox is maybe the worst solution. Even early-startup-menu would be better and that is already a bit complicated. IMO the easiest is the script solution.

[derSammler]

Originally Posted by Daedalus

HDToolbox is a tool, just a different one and less convenient for putting in a little icon-driven script to make the changes.

Yes, it's also a "tool" of course. But you have it right from the start, as it is part of Workbench.

HDToolbox is maybe the worst solution.

Would you let us know why? I don't see why a GUI-driven tool that is part of Workbench and allows changing the boot flag by a mouse click is "maybe the worst solution".

[DisasterIncarna]

and if on the same boot partition you could keep 2 or more "workbench" installs for different OS and just have your startup-sequence do a version check then assign SYS: / etc to a subfolder that contains whichever OS you want and execute the startup-sequence in the newly assigned SYS:S so you could have OS32 OS31 OS4 etc as subfolders ready to be assigned, bit of a faff but would work.

[daxb]

Just count the mouse clicks that are necessary to navigate through HDToolbox. Early-startup-menu is already shorter/better. ChangeBootPri in a script needs a single, double click or a hotkey to launch/work and it is 10 times smaller in size. You can also have GUI requester if you need it.