SDBox installation

[russellnash]

After initially buying my first ever Commodore Amiga A500 and fitting a Goex over a year ago, I didn't use it afterwards. I suddenly got the urge this week to do something more with it. In the mean time I had bought myself an SDBox, 2mb Ram upgrade and a USB mouse adapter, because the Amiga mouse is very 1987.
I tried playing Ambermoon, which is on 10 disks, plus a save disk, and found the constant disk swapping made it not very enjoyable. What should I do? How about I get the SDBox hard drive alternative working?
The installation guide isn't at all helpful, especially to someone with no experience. Amigastore does an install program, but it turns out it doesn't work properly on Workbench 1.3.
The best source of information I could find was here.

You need to copy some Driver files into folders on the workbench 1.3 disks. Those files being SD0 Version 1.3_v34.20, SD0.info and spisd.device, which go into the devs folder, then fat95 in the l: folder. The first problem is, how do I do that? I tried copying files onto the ADF image of workbench using my Linux operating system. It is possible to open ADF images using the following commands, for example:

mkdir sdbox
sudo mount -t affs -o loop workbench.adf sdbox

I copied the relevant files, and they are there when I reload the workbench.adf, but the Goex gives an error FAT 02 when I try to boot with it. So what to do? Well if you have a Microsoft OS you can use ADFOpus, which I am sure many of you are familiar with, to open disk images and drag and drop files. The second problem is, these files wont fit on the workbench disk image until you make some room. I decided to delete some utilities like Clock, Graphicdump, which I assumed to be non essential.

After putting the SD0, SD0.info and the spisd.device files into devs directory and installing the fat95 file into the l: directory, you can then open a shell and type in mount SD0: from devs/SD0, followed by cd SD0:

So after a lot of frustration it works! It is easy when you know how. I installed Ambermoon without problems, but when I tried to load it, I got a not enough RAM message. So the next thing was to install the RAM upgrade. That involved taking out the GARY chip, putting it in an adapter and connecting two wires to the Trapdoor board. So far no errors or crashes.
I have attached a Zip with some files that could potentially be useful for anyone doing an SDBox install.

[russellnash]

After two weeks running Workbench from the Floppy Drive DF0: I have found out that there are limitations, particularly all the disk swaps. I have been trying to find out about editing the startup-sequence file to make it boot Workbench from the SD0: drive. I did a lot of reading but it seemed to be beyond me. A very helpful person posted an example here, which works fine. I have copied it here in case it disappears one day.

setpatch
setclock load
resident Cli L:shell-seg system add
resident c:execute pure
mount newcon:
binddrivers
cd devs:
mount SD0: from sd0
cd SD0:
assign >NIL: SD0: exists
if not warn
assign sys: SD0:
assign c: sys:c
assign l: sys:l
assign fonts: sys:fonts
assign S: sys:s
assign Devs: sys:devs
assign Libs: sys:libs
makedir ram:tr
assign t: ram:tr
path RAM: C: sys:utilities sys: system s: SYS:prefs add
cd SD0:
loadwb
endcli