I have said, on Atari-forum some time back, that the floppy drive is one of the most important peripheral and it frequently break down. That is why I invested in a SD HxC floppy emulator & have hinted others to do so. The floppy is the 1st thing you need especially to build a new hard disk.
My boot disk in the SD, is a simple floppy with hd driver, editor and other disk tools.
The other way, is to have
another boot hard disk ready that you can plug in, and put the new hard disk as the 2nd drive. I also frequently do this on my Falcon. (I also make back up this way, since I seldom use my SCSI devices nowadays).
On that Aranym set up. This is something new, and may be worth a try. Something for me to experiment.
From: Christos Tziotzis <ctziotzis@gmail.com>
To: Peter Slegg <p.slegg@scubadivers.co.uk>
Cc: mint@lists.fishpool.fi
Sent: Sunday, 10 March 2013, 22:40
Subject: Re: [MiNT] No floppy
By mounting your HD on a PC with Aranym. That way you can work with it. Alternatively you can invest on an HxC floppy emulator and use the sd card there as a floppy.
Regards
Christos
2013/3/10 Peter Slegg
<p.slegg@scubadivers.co.uk>
Yesterday I was trying to install an IDE CF card reader but I couldn't
get the Milan to boot from the HDD when it was installed.
Somehow it managed to damage the C: partition. Eventually I
had to install an old HDD to boot from and then, use HD-Driver
to zero the partition and then I could copy C: across.
If I had had a boot floppy with the right stuff on it it might
have saved me some time but later I thought that floppies are
effectively a dead technology and most other OSes can be installed
from CD.
How would you install Mint or anything on an Atari without
a floppy ?
Peter