Expert: Gregory Donner - 10/14/2007

Question
Hello, I have had an A1200 for a few years, when I got it I had slowly rebuilt it and cleaned it over the past few years, however now I've hit a stumbling block, the original workbench disk set that was with the system, had become corrupted, but not too much to at least know that the 80mb hd that I had scavenged from a dead laptop did work with the system. I came across the adf files for the workbench 3.1 disk set, and tried the method of setting up the disk via WinUae, carefully following the instructions. winuae saw the HD, and sucessfully installed workbench 3.1 on the hd, however upon putting the hd back in the amiga, it will not boot the HD, instead it displays the familiar "Insert System disk" screen that I'm all too familiar with. No matter what I try I get the same result, an HD that will boot in winuae, but not from the amiga. Have I done something wrong? or does workbench 3.1 not work well with the kickstart roms I have (3.0) any ideas would be appreciated

Answer
Hi Robert,

Workbench 3.1 definitely requires Kickstart 3.1 ROMs installed in your A1200 in order to work with it. It was not intended to be compatible with the 3.0 ROM set. There are a couple different places you should be able to buy the 3.1 ROMs at:

Software Hut in Pennsylvania, USA (www.softhut.com) and/or (if you're in Europe) AmigaKit (www.amigakit.com). You may also be able to find someone on eBay.com selling the 3.1 ROMs, but as always with auction purchases, be sure you're buying from a reputable seller.

In addition, I would also suggest trying to get hold of a new (or good used) set of Workbench 3.1 disks and make backups of them to have on hand. Also, be sure that you specify Amiga 1200-specific 3.1 ROMs, as they differ slightly--and are incompatible--with other Amiga models.

I hope this helps!

Greg