Trust me this is one of the best if not the best tutorial on how to do this on You Tube. Ive spent many years and many methods doing this over and over again to many Amigas. As a noob myself once it was daunting and trial and error especially if you had forgotten all about old Amiga file formats and partitions not to mention shell commands. This video is straight to the point, easy to follow and produces results. Great Vid !
I have this video to thank for the last I don't know how many hours now that I've now spent downloading, installing, cursing, remembering, chuckling and wishing Commodore hadn't gone bust. Thank you my good man, I see many more hours being used up in the near future, particularly when I show the kids how things used to be!
Ah man, the A1200 was an awesome machine. These kinds of videos make me gutted i no longer have it. My mum couldn't afford to buy a home computer growing up and i was fortunate that she wanted to get some sort of electronic home entertainment system for her kid's (me and my younger sister), knowing all the other kids at school had cool stuff and not wanting to leave us out. So she managed to save up enough to buy me and my sister a joint Christmas present around 1995 i think it was, that was a sega mega drive with 4 game's each plus the included 3 game cartridge. We was always able to get another game or 2 each on the birthdays and Christmases that followed. A computer was just well out of reach for what my mum had though. When i was about 15 around 2003 i think it was, a woman from a few doors down the road had an A1200 that she was going to get rid of because it was her sons when he was younger and he had moved out and no longer wanted it and it was just sitting there not being used. She had seen us going in and out of the house and would say hi when we passed so knew my mum had kids and had knocked to see if we wanted it when we was at school. I got home and there it was, all sorts of joystick's, a 2nd external floppy drive, a floppy disk case with about 200 floppy disks, about 20 boxes that where each individual games that were 4 disk, 6 disk, 8 disk and im sure one was 14 floppy disks for just that 1 game they was in the box for. It was my first computer and it was awesome and only ever using a proper computer at school for 2-3 hours a week it was pretty easy to get used to it not having a tower with its own operating system installed on it and not having its own inbuilt applications. Was i bit long having to go through all the floppy disks to find the application i wanted to use though, i soon separated the best ones from the rest too make that easier though. I did find a few floppy disks that were interesting though and when using them it was like they would give the computer its own actual simple operating system. Though quite a basic and a bit primitive , they was still some kind of operating system either way. The best one that i remember that had the most application's and useful stuff on just the single floppy disk was this one that was black and blue but had a calculator, calendar, and a clock which were all quite big and open by default on the main page. Then it had 4 folders, a folder creator and file manager. Going through these folders, they seemed to have load's of different things but most of them actually didn't do anything or said it doesn't exist which im assuming you could probably use another floppy on the external drive with this disk and were names of files left from that. What i did find that worked though was a word program, a paint program which was actually in colour even though everything else had been black and blue at this point. I mean it make's sense though, black and blue paint would be pointless. Anyway this paint program was really simple, had 8 colours i think it was, some shapes and lines, thin, medium and thick options, a spray, a fill , erasure, clear, save and open and that was it. Those were the only things i found to work going through that file. Going back and opening the other folder and looking through that was some files that opened a rectangle with a play, pause, stop and a previous and next button. The folder's that opened this all played a short sound, i know there was a bell, a horn, an owl, a telephone and cant remember the rest but there was about 20 of these and they were all similar kinds of sounds anywhere from about half a second too 2 seconds long. Closing that and opening another folder the only thing i found that worked was something that looked like a pie chart that had pink and blue sections with a number of KB in each one. Last folder i opened had 3 smaller folders which were all games. They all actually had little pictures above each name but going through them the only games that worked was a break out game, the most simple pinball game to ever exist and one more thing on this floppy that wasnt black and blue and actually had colour was a pacman game which was tiny. Was roughly about 10cm across and 10cm high because the games on this disk opened to their own individual window that was a fixed size. Couldn't make it bigger or smaller, only close, move it around or few options for the game. The other games were bigger fortunately. Anyway yeah, thought i would share because even now to this dsy i think that was such an awesome floppy disk and is amazing and quite impressive how much stuff was fit on too it. Oh yeah, i did have one bad experience with the A1200. I done hours of history course work on it and had it all saved too floppy and went in the day it was due to print it off from the school computer. I logged in to my school account, put in the floppy disk and tried to open it and got pages of random symbol's and stuff instead of all the text i had wrote. Wouldn't read it anymore in the Amiga when i got back home either. That was when i learnt about different computers having different file name's and types when they save, download and open stuff up.
When I was sitting in front of a friend's Amiga500(I was still using a C64) back in the day, I would have never imagined that in 2020 I would watch videos about Amiga computers. Oh, and the lockdown thingy.
glad to see a how to on this. I already did my 1200 the old file structure way with more partition s, but this is way less complicated and less chance of running into problems. I think I'll actually format my CV card and do it this way!
Great tutorial. If anyone is trying to do this in 2021, now that diskpart has dropped support for removable media, you can achieve the same thing in disk management in win 10, go to the partition of your sd card, right click and delete it.
It's a bit like one step forward and one back, but found that when working with CF cards it was easier to make an Image of the card - even if blank, this'll give you a size correct file to mount in WinUAE. When happy with the install, write the image back to the card.
My son was rolling on the floor laughing because of your Mr.T imitation! 😂😂😂He was just in the room when I saw your vid. He is only 9-yrs old, and has no knowledge about Mr.T.
Hi, at 7:55 we can see 2 new drives appearing : DH0 and DH1. What are they supposed to be? Because in the video a bit further we need to copy some files on DH0... Thanks
a small 200+ meg workbench partition.. lol its amazing, I remember my first a1200 hard disk being a whopping 40mb, for workbench and any games I needed to install.
It's worth to emphasize, that ClassicWB install itself onto its own virtual hard drive (System.hdf), and after the installation it has to be copied onto the CF card partition HD0.
@tzok83, Thanks man, You save my work because after CLASSIC WB finish job my CF still empty. Just i Copy all content from System.hd (important check from right button menu option - show all files) and CF boot in Amiga 600. Now i fight now for working PCMCIA in Amiga 600 for easy file transfer.
Ok some thoughts after installing this twice - never managed to get it working with pfs3aio. Drives formatted that way wont boot with ClassicWB, dont know why, changed so many stuff in WinUAE, so I've done it with standard file system. 2nd thing, WinUAE needs to see the card as .UNK and not .MBR, otherwise you get that error when trying to save partitioning changes to drive.
Hey - I get an error - System.zip must be present on your first harddrive partition. This partition should be identifiable as DH0: The install disk will attempt to unzip DH0:System.zip
Thank you nice tutorial! I think on 6:29 you are getting this error because the CF card is still mounted by Windows. If you remove and reinsert the card before you start the Winuae part (or if you restart the computer like you did) it will work without error
When I do this and start up workbench I have 570.000 graphic mem and 0 other mem and obviously no game can run. In this video the amiga has 1.795.000 mem. Should this work on a stock machine without memory extension?
Thanks for helpful video. Btw, I noticed that the KGWHD archive is sort of old, does the files of the archive work together with the newer install sets on whdload.de? Meaning, could you just copy the files form the "source" folder from KGWHD into a whdload installed folder to update?
Somehow I am getting an error message under Kickstart 3.1 on my A600 which is probably due to the fact that the 2nd partition is over 2GB. I also have the Cloanto 3.X ROM which should fix that issue, but I can't get it to load the Workbench even though I have copied over a workbench.library to the LIBS folder. Which Kickstart version are you using?
Lost at 7:55 --- In the video you now have two drives in the WinUAE setup (dh0 and dh1) You remove the floppies and add the Hardfile and somehow boot into an installer. Trying to recreate your situation I have the Hardfile and CF card added (the same way as eariler in the tutorial). But I only boot to the "instert a floppy" screen...
Hi. I’ve encountered the same problem. But the thing is, your hardfile should be dho (with bootable option), and your CF card dh1. Then it boots from the hardfile and begins Classic Workbench installation.
+Larry Bundy Jr You could transfer the whole lot as a zip and then unpack it on the Amiga. But that would be pretty slow, especially if you did it on the real hardware. With the PFS3 file system in the video you can have whopping partitions up to 137GB! Whoooo! I probably should have mentioned that!
And an update for you that don't know or follow up Amiga stuff. From recent time back WHLOAD has become absolutely free, i think the current version is 18 at this point. It will eliminate nag screens and and remove some limitation to the games you couldn't played in the past if you didn't buy / register program, so download latest version and replace that one in classic workbench setup if you are using. It should also improve some compatibility issues with certain games or allow you to install even more games if you have space, Amiga library is really HUGE and people always say you can get every game on CF card and have it all . actually if you plan to have them all on your disposal and even certain versions , 4 gb isn't even close enough.
+Idimi Dodjimi Yup, it's awesome isn't it. Hence why it's included with Classic Workbench. You're right 4gb is pretty limiting, but the beauty with this installation is you can have even larger partitions. All you gotta do is supply a bigger card :D
Just a thought about formatting the card in an Amiga: Why can't you use the PFS3 there? Couldn't you just write the handler to a DOS formatted DD floppy disk (if you have a USB disk drive), boot Workbench, load CrossDOS, with this, copy the files over to an Amiga disk and use them from there? Where is the catch?
It was really fast, I had in mind to get another cf card and a pcicia card and drivers etc, move it between the pc and the amiga that I have. So glad I found this, but I didn't really catch what kind of files it was supposed to be, everything I have is in ADF, is it another format that I need to have it as?
I must be doing something wrong, when i try this on a real CF card i get a basic WB3.1 install and not the classic workbench? No issues installing it to a virtual drive within UAE though. What am i doing wrong?
I was curious about changing the DOS Type for additional partitions @ 5:57. Is this really necessary? If I can select the PFS3 File System from the Filesystem Characteristics section and apply it, shouldn't that be enough? Then again, you did have to re-enter the DOS Type numbers. Another RU-vid video I saw on this process skipped this step for additional partitions. The reason I ask is I did not do this for my 16GB CF card and only one (DH0) of my three partitions is mounting on the Workbench while the card is installed in my A1200. Funny thing is, they are visible while in WinUAE. Something about how the real IDE controller works vs an emulated one perhaps? I am going to retry adding the DOS type for my other two partitions while booted from the real A1200.
Ok, making progress. I've got up to 7:55, but now I'm stuck again lol. Question: Now I have set up the drive and partitions, can I use my ACA500 Plus to do the rest?
Say I already had a nice ClassicWB install that I run on WinUAE / FS-UAE and don't want to spend hours setting up again - is it possible to copy that folder to the CF card somehow and make it bootable on a real Amiga? I love this video but it kind of assumes you're installing directly to the card. I did the whole install via emulation as I didn't have real hardware at the time, but now I have my A1200 I'd love to just copy it over to the real thing. edit - think I've answered my own question. Mount both in WinUAE and copy all the files over!
which version of winuae are you using? i'm using the latest 3.5.0 and i'm struggling to follow you on some parts. maybe if I use the same version as yours I can follow easier?
I've managed to get up to step 4. but my screen hasn't updated to what you show. also all that shows up in CD & Hard drives is compact flash, pfs3aio, system.hdf whereas yours shows DH1 DH0 i'm so confused
update, i've gotten up to stage 4. i've managed to load the games onto the CF, but the system files for some reason are on the WB desktop and I can't locate the correct system file to move them onto the CF
apparently I need to install cfd and fat95 from aminet to get it to read the CF reader. gonna follow this amiga.erkan.se/index.php/transfer-files-from-your-pc-to-your-amiga-with-a-compact-flash-pcmcia-reader/#more-564 fingers crossed it works
Ok, I lost it in 8:15. It boots from the just installed system and not from the system.hdf. And I don't see those DH0 and DH1 in WinUAE, just the pfs3aio and CF-card I put there earlier. EDIT: Now I got the WB3.1 installed and can boot from system.hdf (ide0) but if I add the CF-card (ide1) with formatted empty partitions then it wont boot anymore. Loads few secs and then crash on black screen. EDIT2: Now I got it to boot by renaming the CF-card's System-partition name to System2. Now I see all the partitions when booted from system.hdf. But, System2 is no visible in Dopus, going to figure that out next..
It seems he moved from CF to hard drive files for some reason - because it's not a physical drive, he mounted the two files, one for each partition. The drive names are still the same as the partitions though so it should make no difference to the rest of the tutorial. My problem is rather that doing what he says, does nothing. Removing the Kickstart disk means removing any means of booting the Amiga so now it sits at the start screen doing nothing.
I am experimenting with this, using Xubuntu Linux at the moment. Because you know... Windows is not obscure enough. And for the kick of it. Yeah..... Anyway.... I have done a 1gb 2.5 inch IBM harddrive with WB 2.04 so far on my A600 KickStart 37.300 and a 512mb CF card. I used FS-UAE on Linux.
Can't download the WHD's AND! I have installed WB3.1 on my Amiga already, did that like 2 years ago, the big problem here is that I don't have any expansions in my computer and you don't really specify what does what for what system and what you need, it's just a speeded guide really. Could you perhaps make a new install video that isn't that hasty?
+Nostalgie Nerd Hello, great video tutorial 👍 but i have a technical question. I have a ORIGINAL CD-ROM of Amiga OS 3.9 + a ORIGINAL DVD of Amiga for ever (with all roms and disks), do i need to install classic workbench or can i install the Amiga OS 3.9 directly in place of it ? I am an old Amiga fan because a had an REAL AMIGA 500 AND AMIGA 1200 but they die both some years ago. Now i use WinUAE.
great video however im stuck on something stupid. i have an 8gb cf card and ive managed to format it (500mb dh0. 4gb dh1. 3.5gb dh2) its a different process for 8gb for formatting as you have to load a scsi shell up and boot into that mode in order to see more than 4gb. anyway. ive got to the bit to install classic workbench.. and it keeps saying cannot find system.zip in dh0! i notice in your video just before you go to install classicwb in your drives setup i cant see the cf drive selected just c:videotemp/dh0.hdf. c:videotemp/dh1.hdf and then the classic workbench hdf. for me i have the hard drive selected (formatted all in workbench etc. workbench. games 1 and games 2) and then i select the classicwb .hdf however i cant install it as its saying it cant find system.zip on dh0. its wrecking me :(
i followed your steps but as i wanted to change the file system on the other partition it was already in the list to choose from also i dont see the hard drive in winuae as soon as i reboot the virtual mashine does anyone have the same problem ?
hi, well after diskpart-clean-exit the cf (sandisk 2gb) my winuae toolbox do not detect the cf.Then go back run diskpart-select drive-clean-create partition primary-exit,the cf was detected... happy happy.
I bought a ready made flash card with WHDload on it, and have the workbench disks, I tried installing it but it had an error and failed, thankfully my A1200 still works on the old HDD plugged in so I can game still, Would I need a totally new flash card and to follow this tutorial? Or is the flash card dead?
I had no real idea what I was doing, just some lousy documentation from Amiga kit.. Sadly I have no one here to help me so relying on videos and online guides..
cheers for direct links to roms and adf, BUT! I did not get the point where you ACTUALLY install Classic WB to a CF card. Cuz adding hdf file will set up Classic WB for WinUAE as its HD drive, not to CF card
Can this be done on an Amiga 500 if you upgrade it? Also, does this method play the games exactly as if they were real retail hard discs, or is it emulation?
Small addition, after having made the error on my side : before the begining of the installation of Classic Workbench, don't forget to raise the "Chip" memory to 8MB in the RAM setting : otherwise, some program would not run (Direct Opus in particular).
nice. megadrive and mega cd are my fav consoles, so when I got the dough I'm gonna buy a multi mega and an everdrive cart. Was also thinking of making an original xbox softmod guide.
I've got a everdrive cart for my megadrive model one. can't afford a mega CD or 32x just yet mind lol. I've done the 50/60 htz mod on it though. I only paid about 35 quid for the everdrive new. it was the lowest price I'd ever seen one for, and it works great. esp good for Japanese games and ROM hacks too!. if you haven't seen one that cheap and are interested in where to get one from, let me know ☺
+Nostalgia Nerd I bought mine from Ali express. I know some people give it a bad rep for selling fake trainers etc but I've bought lots of repro carts from there and a everdrive for megadrive, snes and n64, plus an action replay for the saturn which I modded to play imports/ backups.
Awesome guide. I have an Amige 1200 with a Phase 5 Blizzard 1220 expansion card instaleld. Is there anything in your steps I need to do different or will the Amiga automatically detect the eztra horsepower?
I don't suppose you could do this again, but with a 16GB SD card? I have the correct hardware for the Amiga, but following your guide, I never seem to to get all of the space. If I try to install newer scsi drivers, it all messes up for me.
FairFight14 you need to follow an extra step before you are able to partition the drive etc etc. you have to google "Partitioning 16 GB Compact Flash card with WinUAE and PFS3" follow the steps there. on 16bit dust. also the drive must show as UHK not MBR. u must use disc manager in windows. new volume. fat 32. then run diskpart. clean it. itl show as uhk then. select it and then follow the steps. remember to NOT use install3.1 disc. use regular workbench3.1 as itl not have permission to make changes.
Retrobution Thanks... But after a few days after my last post, I figured it all out. I have it all in WinUAE ready to copy over now. I also bought an SD extender, so it's fair easier to rebuild, if something messes up.
Would absolutely love an Amiga 1200/600/500+ fully kitted out with a working printer, accessories, o.s and office software to use as my main computer without internet. It will be my thing to do in the next year or so. I want a complete solution An Amiga fully pimped with as many mods as possible so that I had the base 80's/90's machine but fully upgraded. Its just a mine field getting started.
+Gary James Thanks! Of course you can, and indeed have. I'm going to do an install on an A600 in the next few weeks, so I may well install it alongside that.
Great tutorial and thanks for putting this together and sharing with the Amiga community. Regrettably I am having problems with WHDLoad opening ALL the games on my system. I am using the SCALOS ClassicWB_ADV customised WB. However every time I try to open games using WHDLoad and the AmigaGuide Game Launcher I get the following error: "Could't load Workbench: Games/directory/and name of game" "agl:c/wbrun failed returncode 20" I suspect this could be because I have installed a Kickstart 3.1.4 ROM in my system and also installed AmigaOS 3.1.4 so I could use a drive in my system greater than 4GB. It was not possible to setup the system.zip file using this ROM image with WinUAE so I had to use a Kickstart 3.0 or 3.1 ROM to create the system.zip file. Now that I have copied the system.zip file to DHO on my real Amia A1200 which has kickstart 3.1.4 ROM chips and AmigaOS installed I get the above error messages. Do you know of any way to use the method you have used with 3.1.4 and if so could you point me in the right direction. I could put the 3.1 or 3.0 roms back in my real Amiga and do the process over again system but I would not be able to use my existing 32GB CF cards and don't want the limitation of 4GB. Any help or advice would be greatly appreciated Michael
Do you really think that a normal person can follow this speed? There's a huuuge steps in the very important parts and some of commands can't just be seen. What's the point of making a tutorial if you assume that the watchers already know what you're doing..
Well said. I've followed this tutorial few times but when I clicked Save changes to the drive, nothing happend, this button just got greyed out and the status was Unchanged. After rebooting, I got no disks (DH0 and DH1). I don't know what's going on. I always start WinUAE as admin.
Got as far as installing Classic Workbench, which boots up ok.. but as soon as I add my SD card as Hard Disk, it boots into AmigaDos. I can't load into Classic workbench's HDF to do the transfer. :S. Also I have an SD card I installed correctly in WinUAE ages ago, but I can't boot this as a hard disk in WInUAE anymore to add games and fix the kickstart rom errors i'm getting in lots of the whdload games. Anyone tried this in a recent WINUAE version?
ok it turns out you missed a vital step... If you don't rename the "System" folder of the Classic Workbench install just after you've run the installer, and plan to hook up your CF/SD card and copy the files across. If you've made a partition called "System" on the CF/SD card, then it won't boot to classic workbench anymore. The 2 Systems get confused and you'll only ever boot to AmigaDOS.
Good afternoon everyone. Congratulations for the channel. Could you make a video-tutorial of the Kgload program? I don't know how to edit the .ini profiles for the different hard drives I have hd1:games1 dh2:games2 Nor can I edit the gamedata that has the images of the games and change this for other images of mine
Tried following this tutorial but when i start the tool box to select the flash drive (even tried a 4GB SD card) there in nothing appearing in the device box, no "Unkown" nothing at all.
Davinci Gaming i found that you have to have a workbench that says the memory amounts and space available on the window titles. i tried the 3.1 install disk but this seemed to be like a "safe mode" of some sorts. load up just workbench 3.1 and see how you get on. also. when u select ur drive in winuae it must not say (MBR) it must say UHK or something like that. to achieve this open up the drive in disc manager in windows. u will see the cf drive. it should be unallocated. select it. give it a new volume. any letter it suggests. then give it a fat32 volume so windows can use it. THEN run disc part. then select it. then clean it. it SHOULD show in winuae as a uhk (i think thats what it is. its not mbr thats for sure. 6 hours doing this last night only for it to show errors). im using windows 10 by the way. for 8gb you must follow an extra step involving a shell command to load in aio-handler. google those steps. even if you follow the steps you may get the error shown here about not able to apply changes. so try running the hdtoolbox with the 3.1wb image. not the 3.1 installi image
I realize this is a bit dated, but don't you have to actually COPY the pfs3aio file over to your hard drive before it will actually work? As far as I can tell, you linked it in WinUAE by mounting the pfs3aio floppy disk image to a drive (F) and using that during the setup, then next magically the hard drive works perfectly. How can it without the PFS3AIO file being on the hard drive?
+Nostalgia Nerd I can understand how WHDLoad is possibly the only choice if you're using real hardware, but then again, not all demos and games have WHDLoad support, and certainly not cracked games, like the ones available from the TOSEC archives, but then many games are only available cracked, I think. I also think it's part of the experience of Amiga to sit through the disk loading, and the vast majority of Amiga used back in the day didn't have hard drives or mass storage on a card.
These instruction no longer work with latest WinUAE. When adding the PFS3 formatted CF card along with the system.hdf, system.hdf is no longer bootable and unable to transfer files acrossed. Looking for more up to date guide that works.
