This tutorial will show you how to troubleshoot your startup-sequence. This is particulary useful if you are creating a compilation disk or ADF and one or more program is forcing you back to Workbench or AmigaDOS and can save you hours of stressful work.

I hope this tutorial proves useful.

You will need the following to follow this tutorial:

• SnoopDOS
• Workbench (any version)

Once you have all of the above proceed to the guide.

Anyone who has tried to create a boot disk for a program or compilation of programs on a single disk would surely have been forced back into AmigaDOS or Workbench without even a courtesy message telling you the problem - well this guide should solve your problems.

Start WinUAE and insert your Workbench ADF images, click the Hard Drives tab and check "add PC drives at startup", if you have it on a virtual hard drive then select the appropriate configuration. Click OK to start the emulation, once Workbench has loaded double click the Workbench disk and open the System folder now double click Shell or CLI (depending on your version of Workbench).

The following window should pop-up:

You will need to download a copy of SnoopDOS (available from this site) and if you are using your real Amiga transfer it accross - click here for information on how to do this. If you are using WinUAE or another emulator you can simply drag it accross to your Workbench disk or access it were ever you unzipped it to.

We are going to use SnoopDOS to troubleshoot our startup-sequence so you will need to copy it to the disk you are trying to fix and then ammend your startup-sequence to run this program first. So drag SnoopDOS from were ever you stored it onto your disk and type the following in the AmigaShell:

• DF0: (assuming this is the drive containing the disk you are troubleshooting)
• ED S/STARTUP-SEQUENCE

Now add the following line to the top of your startup-sequence:

RUN SNOOPDOS

Press ESC then S to save the file followed by ESC then Q to quit the program. You startup-sequence will now be monitored by SnoopDOS and all if any problems will be indicated, for example if you are missing the ASL.LIBRARY SnoopDOS will report:

OPEN: ASL.LIBRARY FAIL

You would then go back to your Workbench and copy the missing library to the LIBS folder, now reboot and try the disk again. Once the disk is working you can remove the SnoopDOS program and line from the startup-sequence by typing the following in the AmigaShell:

• DF0:
• ED S/STARTUP-SEQUENCE

Press ESC then D to delete the first line (SnoopDOS) followed by ESC then S to save the file again.

You startup problems should hopefully be solved. To avoid problems like this in the future make sure that you have at least the following libraries in the LIBS folder of your disk:

ASL.LIBRARY
DISKFONT.LIBRARY
EXPLODE.LIBRARY
IFF.LIBRARY
IFFPARSE.LIBRARY
REQ.LIBRARY
POWERPACKER.LIBRARY