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ACAS, Amiga Computing, Media House, Adlington Park, Macclesfield, Cheshire, UK, SK10 4NP or e-mail us: acas@idg.co.uk

Driving questions

The easiest way to do this is once you have set up your Squirrel with the external hard drive, you will be able to drag over your entire Workbench partition to the external drive. Now use the Squirrel software to produce a boot floppy disk, and then repartition the internal IDE drive. Doing this destroys all the data on the drive. If you now boot using the Squirrel disk you will be able to drag your backup copy of Workbench back over to the new internal partition.

Image perplex

The problem is that now when I load some PD utilities, like Reorg and some document files, I get the message 'please insert ImageFX - cancel/retry'. Then the program loads with no further problems. Sometimes I am asked for the AmigaGuide library but this is in my Libs drawer.

I have tried SnoopDos but am unable to find which libraries or files are missing. By the way, I deleted ImageFX by highlighting the icon and deleting it from Workbench.
Adrian Bernascone, West Sussex

My first reaction would be that ImageFX may have added an extra path in the user startup, but as far as I know it only adds an assign and a new drawer in the Env: directory.

Generally, when you install software, using the normal Installer program we use on the coverdisks, many programs add a few lines to the user-startup file which is found in the S drawer. Usually this is limited to an assign statement, but some programs such as MUI can add quiet a lot.

This all means that when you come to removing a program from your hard drive, it is not only a case of deleting the program's directory, but also removing its related lines from the user-startup - not the most friendly way of working, I know. This is a problem with the Amiga's assigns, and you can blame Commodore for not implementing some sort of assign demon that sits in the background watching assigned programs and updating them when programs are moved or deleted, and programmers for not using the PROGDIR assign more often, which could potentially do away with assigns.

The best advice I can give is to tell you to carefully check your User-Startup, Shell-Startup and Startup-Sequence for any mention of ImageFX and remove it from these files.

As for the AmigaGuide library problem, there are a couple of version doing the rounds - one is for workbench 1.3 and is around 70k, the other is the one you get with your Workbench disks and is around 20k. You should make sure you have the correct version installed.

Stupid Frank

Last week I could not go out because of a chest infection, and being at a bit of a loose end I thought I would tidy up five years of rubbish that had accumulated on both DH0 and DH1. I went a bit silly deleting files I thought I did not need, but obviously some of those I deleted were definitely needed because when I went to boot up from the hard drive all I got was what looks like a CLI screen with:

AmigaDOS
copyright© 1985-1991 Commodore-Amiga
All Rights Reserved

I had the stuff I wanted backed up on floppies, so in my little tin pot way I thought 'No problem, I'll just reformat the hard drive'. That was mistake number two. Number three came when I tried to get everything back with Quarterback - a coverdisk back in December 1993 - but this just seemed to make things worse.

Could you please tell me what to do to get back to normal, and I promise not to be stupid ever again. Also, please inform the rest of your readers to follow the great American saying: 'If it aint broke don't fix it'
Stupid Frank, Manchester

Oh dear, it looks like you managed to get yourself in a right mess here. I will start off by saying it is a good idea to go through your hard drive and remove old/unnecessary files, as long as you do not start trashing the system files. This is one reason for always having two partitions - one containing all your Workbench files and the other for your day-to-day work files. If you then delete stuff from your Work partition you will not damage any of those all important system files, but you should learn from your mistakes.

The first priority is to get your Workbench back up and running. Assuming, from what you have said, you have completely formatted your drives and there is nothing of use left to recover, you will need to boot your computer with your original Workbench disk. Once Workbench has loaded you will see your now empty hard drive partitions. To get Workbench set up as quickly as possible, and assuming you do not have any hard drive install disk, do the following.

1. Select your DH0 partition and do a quick format on it to make sure it is completely empty
2. Open up the Workbench disk's icon and select Ôshow all filesÕ from the Window menu
3. Press the right Amiga and A keys, to select all the files in the Workbench window
4. Holding the shift key down, drag all the files over to your DH0 partition
5. Once all the files are copied, reset your machine and Workbench should bootup from the once defunct drive.

This will give you a working Workbench on your hard drive, but it does not do much to get your lost files back. If you cannot get any files back from the backup you have done then there is very little you can do in retrieving the old files. It may be possible to use something like DiskSalv, but if you have formatted the drive and written back over it then there will be very little left intact for DiskSalv to recover. Your only option is to reinstall your software from scratch.

A general rule to follow when deleting files is, do not touch your Workbench files. These are things in your C, S, Devs, Libs, L, Classes and Locale drawers. Just stick to removing old data files such as pictures and text, or programs you do not use any more.

Slow 60s

It is annoying to find that spending money upgrading your machines actually reduces the amount of software that it can run, and not the opposite. Publishers should maximise their markets and not alienate high-end users. ECS compatibility is sensible, after all the PC does this in its support of lower-end graphics such as VGA as well as SVGA, but more powerful AGA machines should not be ignored.
Sam Smith, North Yorkshire

What we found when trying the Blizzard 1260 board is that games such as Nemac IV and Breathless ran, but incredibly slowly. This is to do with how the 060 works, and is something the software programmers could not have foreseen. To stream line the 060 execution path, not all the 680x0 instructions are built into the 060.

Unknown instructions cause a trap and during the trap the emulation has to find the right emulation routine and run this function. In a trap the processor is in the Supervisor mode and no other tasks can run. This effect is visible by the mouse jerking around. The system will become more unusable the more unimplemented instructions are used by a program.

If you buy the blizzard 1260 you get a program with it called CyberPatcher that attempts to change the instructions in these programs to one that will not cause a trap, therefore making the program run at full speed. One such program is Mand2000 which goes from running at around the same speed as an A1200 to running almost three times faster than an A4000. Unfortunately, this patch does not have any effect on Nemac IV and Breathless.

You might like to know that Alien Breed - The Killing Fields also suffers from this problem, but the CyberPatcher program does work, therefore allowing you to run the game on full screen.

The only real way around this current situation is to recompile programs especially for the 060 chip - perhaps the companies could provide an upgrade to 060 owners. The compiler would then make sure that the code ran as fast as possible and remove all these speed problems. The problem with this fool-proof plan is that I am not sure if any such compiler exists. There is, however, a new C++ compiler coming out from Germany called StormC that can apparently compile optimised 060 code.

I do sympathise with how you feel - when the A1200 first came out many programs fell straight over. This was them either doing naughty things to the chipset or it was their use of self modifying code that choked on the 020's cache. We at Amiga Computing have always complained when software did not support accelerated machines and hard drives. If they do not do this, what is the point in upgrading in the first place? The 060 situation is an unfortunate, but unavoidable, one and you really are at the mercy of the software manufacturers producing 060 versions of the original.

Help please

I have tried everything, checked the partitions, rebooted, and even reformatted and copied the software back onto the drive to no avail. I then tried to copy the programs from their original floppies and voilˆ, they all worked perfectly. This is obviously very tedious and makes backing up programs to my Sysquest pointless. I suspect there is a problem with the copy function from one drive to the other, even though I use the 'all' statement and it only affects tools, since Workbench and all other utility directories operate normally.

I need your help. The Amiga is an orphan in America and I cannot get an answer. The drive manual refers to PC installation only, and all technical support personnel are programmed for PC-related problems and have no Amiga knowledge what so ever.
William Trotter, Metairie La. USA

I am afraid you are not going to like my reply too much as unfortunately, I have no idea what your problem could be. The frustrating part is that we have just installed a 1.6Gb IDE drive to our A4000 and are now having the same problem. At first we thought it may be the Maxtransfer rate or the Mask that you can set through HDToolBox, but none of these seemed to have an effect.

I found that using the copy command from Shell did copy the programs over so they worked, but this is still a very unsatisfactory situation to be in as we cannot use Workbench or Dopus to move programs around. If anyone has the solution to this problem then please send it in as we have had several letters about it.

Slow screens

I originally got more RAM because I found out that the screen slowed down when a lot of windows were opened. At times it go so bad that the mouse would sometimes hardly move, or the computer would freeze, and this was with 4Mbs sometimes still available.

I may have got it wrong but I think I might need a graphics card or something. I wondered if you could help me out by letting me know what I need, and the rough cost.
Mark Williams, williams@madmark.demon.co.uk

Unfortunately, you are pushing the Amiga's graphics to the limit. To correctly redraw the Workbench screen every window needs to be refreshed, and with a lot of windows this starts to take a long time. A graphics card would help the situation as they use their own high speed blitters, but are only available on big box Amigas.

The best way out of this situation is to run as many programs as you can on their own screens. With the introduction of Workbench 2 this became a lot easier with the use of public screens, and just about all programs allow you to open a new screen or run them off an existing screen. This will leave your Workbench as clear as possible, and therefore your windows will redraw as fast as possible.

Home installation

The physical installation looks OK and when I try to use install v2.05 it seems to correctly prep the HD, but cannot format it. Instead, the following message appears: Warning: Hard disk partition WB_2.x: cannot be found! This script formats partitions WB_2.x: and Work:. Make sure the drive is properly connected and prepped, and the partitions have the correct names.

Any ideas, except buy a new hard drive?
Robert Mitchell, Ireland

As long as the hard drive is installed correctly, and you can hear it power up, I would think your best bet is to try and format the drive by hand as all the programs you need are on the install disk. This involves using a program called HDToolbox. When you first run the program go to the 'Change Drive Type' and define a new drive. If you now read the drive configuration you should see all the different parts of the drive such as the manufacture, how many cylinders there are, heads, and other information you should not change. It will also work out how big the drive is from this information - this should be around the 120Mb mark. If you click on OK and return to the main menu, select partition drive. Here you can select how big each partition should be and how many you actually want. I would stick with the normal Workbench and Work partitions, and make the Workbench one about 15 to 20Mb. You should also make sure Workbench is bootable and that Work is not. Now select OK and save the changes to the drive. When you quit the machine it will reset and you will need to boot up with the install disk again. You will then be able to, if that worked, install Workbench using the installer provided.

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