Where does SYS: get its setting value?

"The" hard disk started dying a while back (dead now), but I had another one so I made volumes with same names but added "10" (work11->work15). It worked. I reinstalled OS4.1 from CD with the system on OS4.1FE.

Had no backup disk (anymore... it had become "The" hard disk). So I still needed another disk. I bought an SSD .. and for that I used the original names: (work1 -> work5). It *is* faster. So I copied OS4.1FE to OS4.1FE_ssd. OS4.1FE became my backup disk and (I thought) OS4.1FE_ssd the system disk. Remember that the old disk was dying and a number of my backups to the Work11 -> Work15 copied directories over, but not always their contents. I found (do find) them empty. I wanted the ssd to be *the* system, so I worked at getting all ok there, with the goal of Work11 -> Work15 to be the online backup. Things got messy and they are imperfect copies of each other.

Months later, now I stored some files on OS4.1FE_ssd and the next day went to SYS: and the files were not there.

ASSIGN informed me OS4.1FE was SYS, ***not*** OS4.1FE_ssd. No wonder I have now & then encountered odd things, but *lots* of old scripts and configurations had gotten changed to citiing Work11 ->Work15, so I just fixed them when they reared their snake like heads.

So, I need to fix this SYS: business. Where do I do that?

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..effects of civilization upon...nature, the growing gap between what education was supposed to accomplish and what it consisted of, the national debt and...high taxes, the problem of the excess cost of medical care -- Philip Wylie, 1951

@ggw

I would guess SYS: is where you boot from so it sounds like you accidently have booted from your old harddisk.

My knowledge about amiga is a little bit rusty but i'm slowly getting to know her again and i do remember that sys: was always the bootpartition but there's probably ways to override that behaviour too.

@ggw

SYS: is set by DOS (just like all the other assigns), and it's set to the volume from which the system is booted.

That is not necessarily the volume from which you loaded Kickstart - it could be another volume. Once you have loaded Kickstart and launched it, the Loader will boot the partition with the highest boot priority and the "Bootable" flag. You can force the Loader to boot from the same partition that provided the Kickstart files by adding the NV-RAM variable "os4_bootdevice=auto". If that variable is missing from the U-Boot vars, you will always get the system partition with the highest boot priority.

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cheers
tony

Hyperion Support Forum: http://forum.hyperion-entertainment.biz/index.php

@monstercoder

Welcome!

@ggw

Related to where the Workbench is, I've found that if you plug in a USB drive, which shares the same label as your Workbench, then Workbench programs will think the USB drive has Workbench files.

@monstercoder

Thank you for joining AmigaWorld.net and posting a reply.

The boot order in the face of "equal" opportunities must devolve to the default hardware search order, since when I checked with Media Tool Kit, neither hard disk is marked as bootable and neither has a priority set.

Those are not the sort of thing I check about once I had the system reconstructed and running. The disks were MEANT to be the same and so they were.

I did make a bootable CD, but that was waaaaaay long time ago and I made plenty of changes.

I have kicked myself repeatedly for not having a made a backup of S:. It is beyond me how I allowed that. Floppies backed up. ZIP disk backed up. Work1, 2, 3, 4, 5 all backed up. CDs for years holding archives never, ever being "needed".

I really comes down to making backups but NEVER forcing myself to "try it out!" Does it actually work?

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..effects of civilization upon...nature, the growing gap between what education was supposed to accomplish and what it consisted of, the national debt and...high taxes, the problem of the excess cost of medical care -- Philip Wylie, 1951

@monstercoder

welcome back

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