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[BGary335]

Let me clarify-I know WHAT Pete was suggesting, but I'm not sure how to go about doing that-and neither did he it seems. What I need to find out is just how to make such a boot disk.

[motorollin]

What version of Workbench are you using?

--
moto

[orange]

long time ago I used unDMS+PC2Amiga to write adf to A500.
it was the only way.
I had to softkick KS2.04 first for pc2amiga to work.
memory was looow so unDMS had to be used instead of DMS.

[AmigaPete]

BGary,
I have been thinking about that a bit. I would copy a normal boot disk and then begin to REM out commands like ADDBUFFERS, RESIDENT and maybe try and not load workbench - you will have to do all the actions from the shell/cli. A basic workbench shouldn't have too much extra stuff on it. By not loading workbench you will probably save the most amount of RAM. Try booting without the "C:Copy >NIL: ENVARC: RAM:ENV ALL NOREQ" or similar command, but you might have to alter the assignment to this "ASSIGN >NIL: ENV: ENVARC:".
Just perform one action at a time and reboot to test that it all works fine still. You will have to copy over the ADF utility to the test workbench boot disk so you will have it when you need it.

Pete :-)

[BGary335]

@motorollin

I'm using 2.1

@Pete

I will try that. Thanks for your help!

[orange]

Pc2Amiga is the best way, especially if you got a lot of diskettes (games?) and its easy since you got KS2.1
All you need is a cable. Then you can use any adf program.

I remember even using pc2amiga as "virtual HDD", by installing game (RogerRabbit) onto PC, its slow but it works..

The only problem is that it doesn't work with winNT (XP, 2000)
someone here mentioned a patch that solves it..

[BGary335]

I'm sure that PC2Amiga is excellent, but as I've said time and again, I don't have a cble, so its not an option for me at this point.

[BGary335]

About madsjm's UAE dms steps...is there a particular program on Aminet that can be used to unpack DMS files on the Amiga side?

[RW222]

Yes, "back in the day" mid 90s, I had a setup where I could use PC2Amiga with a parallel cable to access the PCs drives. I made an amiga native hard disk file on the PC and could save stuff to it. At that point UAE support for hard disk files was either non-existant or in very early stages, and I was really proud of myself for actually managing to boot UAE on the PC using that hard disk file that I formatted and set up from the A1200 over the parallel cable PC2Amiga link...

It was some wierd combination of using a compressed disk driver with a different device type, for a non-compressed volume file... been so long since I did it I forgot the details. I was without regular internet access at that point in time or I'd have posted the solution around, but by the time I got back online and looked around again, UAE had hardfile support.

I also managed to use the PC2Amiga setup to use and mount some Amiga CDs, but support of the formats was a bit touch and go on the PC side and some it wouldn't read, think that was down to the age of the CD Drive and lack of things like multisession support on it (Audio and data tracks on same CD) and failure of MSCDEX to handle some things.

It's my inderstanding however, that DMS files are bigger than the available space on the disk because they contain and preserve formatting information from the original disk. The disks are nominally 1MB in capacity, meaning 120K or so is sucked up in formatting information leaving a useable 880K. So just unpack it, it will fit. I guess no-one in here had the diskspare.device installed and formatted floppies to 960K. You could go that route too if you wanted I guess. Get diskspare device from aminet, decompress the image to a diskspare formatted volume, then unpack it to another disk.

I seem to remember that some magazine coverdisks had a smart implementation of ppack and DMS, where the ADF was ppacked and decompressed on the fly through the powerpacker library, and if the miggy didn't have the memory to do it in one go, it would write half the disk then ask for the DMS containing disk back, read the second half, then write 2nd half when you swapped it back in. Find an old coverdisk with several disks packed on it and look at the startup-sequence and other scripts for clues.

RW222

[BGary335]

Good information. Thanks RW!!

EDIT: I'm a little worried about that diskspare.device. It's quite a hefty file...I hope I have enough room on the WB disk. :-o

[BGary335]

Wow, RW your diskspare.device idea really worked! I was able to get an ADF onto a 960Kb floppy, and then using adf2disk I transferred it to another floppy, and that's it! However, during the adf2disk step I made a brutal mistake-I was a little tardy about getting my WB 2.1 disk out of the drive and putting a blank in, so I accidentally overwrote it. Anyone know any way of rescuing overwritten data? :-D