Hi All,
I'm working on a project and wanted to get some thoughts on an aspect of it. What I want to do is examine a system, determine how many partitions are bootable (a), understand what version that partitions contain (b), detect the system type (c), and build an identifying string to capture those details (d).
For A:
I can walk each partition for a "kickstart" folder but there are times when kickstart is not located on the same partition as the boot partitions. For those cases, I could scan for system folders as well.
For B:
I can version kickstart and workbench. Any suggestions on other critical files or perhaps something in ENV which might reveal more info like 4.1 FE U2 or some such?
For C:
I know there are tools, like Ranger, that can do this but I don't know what they are looking at.
For D:
I'm thinking something like Partition_Version_Machine
Thanks!
Bill
For B, I would recommend you to check the version of the version.library. Every AmigaOS release has an updated version.library, which is the one that marks the version of the OS, i.e
53.16 is AmigaOS 4.1 FE update 1
53.18 is AmigaOS 4.1 FE update 2
Thanks, Walkero.
I found if you version the kernel file with the "full" flag it will give the machine type:
22.System:Libs> version workbench:kickstart/kernel file full
kernel 54.34 (02/05/2021)
AmigaOne X5000 release
I'm not sure you can get completely accurate data. For example, I have update2 installed but had to revert the kernal to keep my Turbotext editor working correctly. A version on kernal would indicate that I'm not running update2 but all the other files on my system partition are update 2. The Workbench version might not be meaningful if the user is using a Workbench replacement application like Dopus5. I'm not sure what you would find if the user is running OS4 classic under emulation on a Windows PC. Amiga is easily customized so getting an accurate picture of the system might not be easy.
X1000 - OS 4.1FE
What are you thinking for A? AmigaDOS is somewhat complicated as you have the device and then volume. You could try the classic DosList functions and walk the list. You could start bottom up with devices and filter out bootable volumes. Or top down with volumes and locate device to filter out. But on Amiga gwtting the device from a volume was not straightforward. Though IIRC OS4 has better functions to do so. Also for later systems DOS_VOLUMELIST Dos object is recommended.