[rescue] AmigaOS 3.1 Install Disk

[Peter Corlett]

On Mon, Jun 11, 2007 at 11:11:00AM +0300, Geoffrey S. Mendelson wrote:
[...]
> Alas, not for the Amiga. Commodore dropped the ball on that one, by 1990
> high density floppy drives were commom, CD-ROM drives were available (but
> expensive) and their 800k floppies never were very reliable.

I have a large pile of still-readable 880kB floppies that say otherwise.

The main reason that high-density floppy drives were not popular on the
Amiga is that the Paula could only clock out data at 500kHz, which is too
slow for high-density drives unless you do a half-speed hack on the drive,
which made the drives slow and expensive.

> Silly question, could one take a bootable Amiga hard drive, and DD it to a
> file on a *NIX system and DD it back to another drive? Does the geometry
> have to be the same? Obviously it would still be the same logical size,
> but it might be easier than trying to get a floppy written.

Yes, that should work. Under the hood, block devices were accessed using a
byte offset from the start of the device and the geometry was irrelevant.
The filesystem knew the geometry data, but that was mainly an optimisation
so it knew where best to put data.

> Do any of the Amiga emulators support external SCSI drives? Could you boot
> a floppy image on the emulator and install it on the drive?

At least the one I used on Linux a while back did.