When a floppy-based Amiga is turned on, it looks for a bootable floppy disk in any floppy drive. This disk can be a copy of your Workbench disk or a bootable application disk.
If a bootable disk is not found, the Amiga displays an animated screen showing a disk being inserted into a drive. Inserting a bootable floppy disk into the drive causes the screen to go blank while the Amiga loads the necessary system information from the disk. If the Amiga needs information from other disks, insert them when prompted by requesters.
Booting from a Workbench floppy takes from 30 seconds to a minute, depending on your language and font settings.
The Amiga's localization features allow you to select any of several languages for displaying Workbench menus, gadget labels, requesters, and other messages. However, selecting a language other than English requires you to load the text for that language from the Locale disk or Locale drawer found in the system floppy disk set whenever it is needed, which can lead to frequent disk swaps on floppy-only systems.
This section describes booting a floppy-based Amiga for the first time and setting you Preferences, including selecting a language other than English. Note that before alternate language settings are chosen and activated, the beginning portion of the system setup must be executed in English.
Once your Amiga system is set up and connected according to the directions in this manual, allow thirty minutes to an hour to boot, make backup copies of your disks, and make all your Preferences settings. Most settings need to be made only once, but you may wish to spend additional time experimenting with some options.
After booting and before any other operations, you must create working copies of your Amiga system software disks. You will need blank 3.5-inch floppy disks to make the copies, one for each system disk you received. Be sure to copy to disks of the same density as the original disks. Always use these copies when working with your Amiga. Store the original Workbench disks in a safe place for future use if necessary.
Label each of the copies clearly and write-protect all of them, except the Workbench copy. Write-protect the disk by sliding the tab in the corner so that the hole is uncovered and open.
Insert the Workbench copy into the internal drive and reboot the Amiga by pressing the Ctrl, left Amiga, and right Amiga keys at the same time and releasing them.
When you set your Preferences, the Amiga needs information from each of your system disks, normally requiring repeated disk swaps on floppy-based systems. The following procedure minimizes the amount of disk swapping by copying information to the Workbench disk or to the Amiga's memory.
If you have two floppy drives and at least 2 MB of RAM, you can leave the Workbench disk in DF0: most of the time and use the second floppy drive (DF1:) for the other disks as they are needed.
To work in a language other than the default, English, you must first change the Preference settings for language, country, and keyboard type in the Locale and Input Prefs editors.
If you saved Preferences settings for Locale and Font, the Amiga must access information from the disks containing the Locale and Fonts drawers to boot. This requires several disk swaps, slowing the boot process. Canceling the requesters that ask for disks during booting causes the system to use the default settings: English/USA for language and country, Topaz 8 for system fonts.
