Booting from a hard drive with the Amiga 500 (kickstart 1.3) on the Replay

One way of booting harddrives on the Replay is by using hard disk files (HDF’s).
The Amiga 500 (kickstart 1.3) had no native support for harddrives though, so we need to patch it in.

We want to add IDE support to the kickstart, and this patch will, don’t let the SCSI part of the name confuse you. I will not go into the details on why it’s called SCSI patch, but this is the one to use. It’s a backward compatibility thing.

This is what you need to get this done.

1. An Amiga 68020+ , real or emulated, with Kickstart 3.1 (rev 40.068)
2. Kickstart 1.3 SCSI patch
3. GPatch
4. GetSCSI
5. A Kickstart 1.3 ROM file (rev 34.005)
6. The A590 setup drive disk (google it).

Let’s get started

Now copy the following files over to your real or emulated A1200/4000 with kickstart 3.1:

1. Your Kickstart 1.3 ROM file (rev 34.005)
2. kick34005.A500.gpatch (from Kickstart 1.3 SCSI patch)
3. scsi.device_40.12 (A1200) _rom.gpatch (from Kickstart 1.3 SCSI patch)
4. gpatch (from GPatch)
5. GetSCSI (from GetSCSI)
6. Workbench 1.3 and Extras 1.3 ADF files

Open a Shell/CLI and CD into the directory where you put the files and type the following:

1. 1> getcsi
2. 1> gpatch kick34005.A500 kick34005.A500.gpatch kick34005.A500_patched
3. 1> gpatch scsi.device scsi.device_40.12 (A1200) _rom.gpatch scsi_patched.rom
4. 1> join scsi_patched.rom kick34005.A500_patched TO kick13ide.rom

This will give you a new patched kickstart file called kick13ide.rom that will be able to boot from a hard disk file (HDF).

Creating a HDF file with FS-UAE

I tried this with WinUAE, but couldn’t get it to work, so use FS-UAE and create a new hard disk file (HDF) by clicking:

And then:

Don’t make the HDF bigger than 1 GB and make sure you create a partitionable disk as shown here:

Write (PrepHD) of the Fast File System handler

At this point we can use our Replay to fine tune the rest. Add the newly created kick13ide.rom to your Amiga 500 ini file like this:

Select your newly created empty HDF as master drive in the OSD of the Replay and insert the A590 setup disk into DF0 using the OSD menu and now do a “Reset target”.

Now, open a shell window and type the following command:

execute PrepHD drive 0			

Press Y to continue and reboot the Amiga core when it’s done. After rebooting, open the shell again and format the hard disk file (HDF) by typing the following in a shell window:

FORMAT DRIVE DH0: NAME SystemDisk FFS QUICK

Our hard disk file (HDF) is now done! To install the workbench to the hard disk file (HDF), launch InstallHD from the The A590 setup disk. Insert the Workbench 1.3 and Extras 1.3 ADF disks files when asked to and all files will be copied over to our hard disk file and it will be made bootable.

Eject the The A590 setup disk and reboot, your Replay should now boot into a fresh Workbench 1.3 environment directly from your hard disk file! Have fun!

A lot of the info in this article was found here, thanks to Francesco Sblendorio from Retroacademy for the info.