AmigaOS4.1 Package
I really did not expect it would have arrived already since normally my wife usually contacts me and informs me my precious stuff has arrived. So I was really surprised when I got home and it was there. This was Thursday 12-4-2012. It was packed, just like my previous package from AmigaKit, really good which shows the package has been treated with all the possible care.
I did decide before that if it would arrive during the week I would wait till Friday evening before installing it. I did not want be up all night while I still had to go to work the next day. But you know very well that once it is there you just got to start with it right away. So I decided to install it after my wife and I would be back from shopping. Just before that I made sure I had backups of all my important files since I wanted to do a clean install. I did expect some issues to arise since with only very limited time on that Thursday evening so it had to be a perfect run without any obstacles. And arise it did since the installation screen did not come up at all. I tried it a few more times and at with some tries I also got some errors when trying to load from the disc which made me think it was the optical drive. The one I use is a very old one and I it did gave me some issues before when trying to read contents on a disc. I could not stop now so I quickly decided to open my wife’s desktop and take out the dvd drive swap it with the one that was in my Amiga A1SE. As it turned out this was a good decision since it loaded up the Amiga OS4.1 installation and I could run the installation. The first attempt did cause it to hang on 5% at the part of copying files to the hard drive but after starting it for the second time it installed perfectly. It was already passed midnight and getting close to 1:00am Friday morning so it was time to call it a day and continue exploring OS4.1 that Friday evening and the weekend.
Amiga OS4.1 - Update 4
With Friday evening having arrived it was time to continue with the installation of the OS4.1 updates. There are 4 updates so far and I knew already that Update 4 required Update 3 and after some investigation I found out that I needed to install Update 1 first and after it Update 2 and so on till Update 4. I soon discovered that Update 1 is a ISO file that needs to be burned on a disc and you need to do a complete new installation. This information was not present in the OS4.1 package I bought. So the installation I made on that Thursday was pointless since I needed to do a complete new installation anyway with OS4.1 Update 1. Eventually, and I did, you will find out about the fact that you need to install Update 1 and forget about the installation disc that comes with the package but putting a note in the box informing users about this would be a must if you ask me.
Once I had the Update 1 installation disc ready I started the installation. Unfortunately it gave me a black screen after the Amiga OS4.1 splash screen. I created it on a DVD instead of a CD so I created also (the only one left) a installation CD but this also failed at the same part. Time to start paying a visit to the Amiga sites to find out what could be causing this. I discovered right away this had to do with the USB modules that are being loaded during the installation. I need to comment them out. In the Kickstart folder is a file called “Kicklayout” in which you can comment out those lines.
Kicklayout file
Sounds easy, right? Making the changes is easy but how to get it back on the disc? No matter what I tried each time I booted from the disc it failed to do so. That seems to be putting a hold on my OS4.1 dreams. I also read on the Hyperion forums that Tuxedo created a bootable partition and booted the installation from that partition. I posted on AmigaWorld.net about having two bootable partitions and also contacted Tuxedu by PM. Besides Tuxedo there was also tonyw who both gave me the information to have a go at it and actually succeed in booting the installation from the bootable partition.
Amiga OS4.1 - Partition overview
The trick is to set the second bootable partition to a higher priority than the Workbench partition so the system will start from the installation partition. I had the Workbench set to 0 and the installation partition to 3. You should not not set bootable partitions to 5 or higher since cd’s are priority 5. You have to make sure that after the installation (so before the reboot) you set the Workbench partition to the highest priority. If you cannot get out of the installation and do this but only reboot you can start from the original OS4.1 disc and change the priorities. This worked really great for me. I will keep the partition with the installation files in case I need to install OS4.1 again. After OS4.1 Update 1 was installed the other updates installed perfectly. It would be great if Hyperion could make some kind of option to select what needs to be loaded in future updates so that A1Se owners can install it without any problems.
So what do I think? It is everything I thought and more. It is so much more stable and I actually can use it without having crashes every 5 minutes. I am really happy I purchased although I did started to fear I would never get it to install. I am still getting to learn all the new stuff and applications I can run now. But so far I have been using CodeBench the most which is one kick ass utility and a must have for every programmer. To round up my OS4.1 review and stealing McDonald’s slogan “I’m Lovin’ It“.
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