Installing to A1200 with HD....help!

Hi, I have just purchased a *mint* A1200 with 500Mb Seagate HD to help me relive my (1980s) youth! However, the last time I owned an Amiga (500) was in 1989, and it didn't have a hard drive....

I have visited the WHDLoad support page and read (amongst others) Cody Jarrett's FAQ, but I am unsure how to proceed.

Apologies for my ignorance, but am I correct in believing that all I need to do is download WHDLoad to my pc and then copy it to a 3.5" floppy?

How exactly do I 'extract the LHA archive' ? (as per Cody's help page).

I would be very grateful for someone to 'walk' me through the process step by step (or point me to such an answer that is already on the forum....)

Thanks very much in advance (I really don't want to endure floppy disks for much longer).

[thomas]

You didn't tell what your actual goal is. WHDLoad is a program which lets you install originally disk based games to an already running HDD. It cannot be used to make a HDD bootable and install AmigaOS (Workbench) on it.

To transfer files from PC to Amiga, you need a fully installed Workbench on the Amiga or at least the complete Workbench disk set (6 disks). Workbench contains CrossDOS which makes the Amiga disk drives able to read PC disks. However, if your Amiga does not have a HD (high density) disk drive, you can only use DD (double density) disks (720K capacity). Run PC0 from Storage/DosDrivers to start CrossDOS.

To make the HDD bootable and install Workbench, boot from the Install disk, rnu HDToolbox to partition the drive, then format the partitions and use the Install script to install Workbench.

Hi Thomas,

First of all thank you for taking the time to respond!

You're quite right, I should have told you my goal....apologies.

Essentially, I wish to transfer my original Amiga software (games) to the Amiga's hard disk.

Tha Amiga already has installed on its hard disk (taken from the 'Workbench about' drop-down bar):

Workbench V 39.29
Kickstart V 39.106

I also have 2Mb Ram & 8Mb graphics Ram (a graphics accelerator is installed).

I have successfully installed some software that is designed to be installed on the hard disk, namely 'Secret of Monkey Island' & 'Battle Chess'; I now wish to install all my other games using (I presume) my pc and WHDLoad.

My first question is:

I have downloaded WHDLoad to my pc's hard disk - now what do I do with it?

(Do I have to unzip it, copy the files to floppy disk and then put the floppy in my Amiga? Or am I going about it the wrong way!)

Please feel free to treat me like a complete novice (I don't mind!)

Your time is appreciated

Thank you

[thomas]

Get lha.run from Aminet. http://de.aminet.net/aminetbin/find?lha.run
Copy both files to a 720KB PC disk. (If they do not fit, copy lha.run first).
Go to the Amiga and start PC0 from Storage/DosDrivers in your Workbench partitions.
Insert the disk. An icon DF0:???? should appear and another one showing the PC disk.
Open a Shell window (Shell is in the System drawer of your Workbench partition).
Enter the following commands:

pc0:lha.run ram:
copy ram:lha c:

(now insert the disk with whdload if they did not fit on one disk).

lha x pc0:whdload_usr ram:

Now close the Shell window and open the Ram Disk window. There should be a drawer called WHDLoad which lets you install the program.

WHDload is only the main program. You probably also need an installer specific to your games from the "Installs" page of www.whdload.de. Use the same procedure to transfer it to the Amiga (you don't need LhA this time, as it is already installed on your Workbench).

One thing I forgot: Windows XP is not able to format 720KB disks. So you have to run PC0 on the Amiga, insert an empty disk, click on the PC0:???? icon once and choose "format disk" from the menu. AFAIK XP will then happily write to the disk.

[Asterix]

Some games might be HD-installable without having their own HD-Install-script and without using WHDLoad. (This applies for disks readable by Amiga-DOS only)
And there is also some games that have an HD-Install-script but no icon for it so you have to use a shell to run the Install.

Sometimes you only have to copy the contents of the whole disk to a directory on your HD.
Others require making some "assign" commands before they run, especially if they are splitted on more than one disk.
(most of the time it works to assign all the names of the disks to the directory on the HD where the disk-contents are in)

When using an A1200 for playing Games you should be aware that some games don't like the AGA-Chipset and might have Graphics-Glitches or exit to workbench or even crash the system.
In that case try using the bootmenu of your A1200 (accessed by holding down both mouse-buttons during boot). There you can choose "Display Options" and set them to "enhanced" or even "original" to Simulate non-AGA graphics, which should work for most games.

Another thing you can do in the bootmenu is disabling/enabling drives and selecting boot-drive (needed if you want to boot from disk and your HD has a higher boot-priority).

Hi Thomas & Asterix!

Thanks for the advice guys.

Asterix - your tips on amending the display options were very helpful; I can now run some games free of graphical glitches. Thanks again for that!

Thomas - I followed your instructions to the letter, however (I bet you guessed this was coming.....) after copying the 'lha' file from my pc to a floppy (previously formatted on my Amiga) and then opening a 'Shell' window, I entered the command: pc0:lha.run ram:

and was greeted with: pc0:lha.run ram: file is not executable.

Do you think that I have a corrupted 'lha' file? (I downloaded it from the link you suggested)

I also tried a different floppy, but to no avail.

Sorry to keep bothering you, but I feel that I am almost there....!

Best wishes & thanks for your patience.

Thanks again to Asterix - some really useful advice there!

[RetroMan]

Try something like EXECUTE PC0:LHA.RUN

Hi again - thanks Retroman, btw.

Trouble is, I am still stuck!

Once I have downloaded the 'lha' file, I save it directly to my personal folder and then copy it to a floppy which I then put in my Amiga.

The file is called 'lhA.run' and is 142KB in size.

Question: should I have done anything else to this file before I copy it to a floppy? (i.e. 'unpack it' or something??)

The error message in Shell is: "object not found" or "file not executable".

Thanks to you all (again)

[Amiga1992]

You SHOULDN'T issue an "execute" command on LHA.RUN, because it's an executable!

So just type "pc0:lha.run" and you should be set. Execute is a command for running scripts.

Retroman you surprised me with that one! :/

Just double click lha.run, no need to be elite at this point lol
Ok, drag & drop it to somewhere else first, like ram disk and then double click so that it doesn't try to unpack itself to floppy.

[Amiga1992]

Then press enter when it gives up the "execute command" box

What were you smoking without me? It self extracts just fine.

edit: So you didn't mean it didn't work right? I'm off to sleep

[thomas]

Originally Posted by mooncat

Thomas - I followed your instructions to the letter, however (I bet you guessed this was coming.....) after copying the 'lha' file from my pc to a floppy (previously formatted on my Amiga) and then opening a 'Shell' window, I entered the command: pc0:lha.run ram:

and was greeted with: pc0:lha.run ram: file is not executable.

Did it really repeat the whole line, or was the message pc0:lha.run: file is not executable ?

In the former case you entered something wrong. The character between "lha.run" and "ram:" must be a space. lha.run is the command and ram: is a parameter (the destination where to extract the files to).

In the latter case there is something wrong with the floppy disk or with your download.

Did you ever start PC0 before ? If so, there are probably some options set which convert text files to Amiga format. As lha.run is a binary file, it must not be converted. Run the CrossDOS tool from Tools/Commodities and disable all options for PC0.

The same is true on the PC. The file must be downloaded binary and not altered. Perhaps you have to use an Aminet mirror with HTML download like www.aminet.net.

[D-Dan]

Windows can sometimes lose the protection bits on Amiga files, and it may be that the "Executable" bit has been lost.

Open a shell (on the amiga), cd to wherever lha.run is and type "protect lha.run +e" (without the quotes) then try again.

Hi again,

Thanks to everyone for taking the time to respond - much appreciated!

Unfortunately, I haven't so far been able to run the programs successfully on my Amiga; it could be down to the floppies I'm using (they've seen better days...). I'll be trying some new ones soon....

Thank you, though - you're a splendid bunch of guys (& girls!)

Best regards