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From: LAVITSKY@BLUE.RUTGERS.EDU@caip.RUTGERS.EDU
Newsgroups: net.micro.amiga
Subject: Re: Suggestions for next release of WorkBench/AmigaDOS
Message-ID: <1233@caip.RUTGERS.EDU>
Date: Sat, 8-Feb-86 14:02:16 EST
Article-I.D.: caip.1233
Posted: Sat Feb  8 14:02:16 1986
Date-Received: Tue, 11-Feb-86 05:41:30 EST
Sender: daemon@caip.RUTGERS.EDU
Organization: Rutgers Univ., New Brunswick, N.J.
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From: Eric <LAVITSKY@BLUE.RUTGERS.EDU>

Hi,

 One other thing I'd really like to see in the next release of the
OS:

	The ability to boot off an external drive!

This should be a fairly trivial thing to do and presents many advantages.
Consider the following scenario:

	You use your Amiga to monitor a home intruder control system
or you use it to control your answering machine (Answermate?). While
you are away, the power goes out... when power is restored, the Amiga
sits there waiting for you to insert the Kickstart disk. You thought
of this ahead of time, so you left a Kickstart disk in the internal
drive... fine. Now after the OS is loaded, what happens? - now it
wants someone to be present to insert a Workbench disk in the internal
drive... luckily, the folks at Amiga modified the current OS to
sequentially search every drive on the system for a disk that it
can boot Workbench off of, and you left a Workbench disk with a
startup script to get your system going again in the external drive,
whew!

As far as I can tell, this is trivial to do - if the internal drive
isn't a Workbench disk and since you can tell from hardware registers
and messages whether a disk is inserted or not, you should easily
be able to go up the device chain looking for a Workbench. This *may*
even make it possible to boot of a hard disk! (???)

Let me know what you all think...

Thanks,
Eric
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