I did an installation of Workbench 3.1 grounds up. The system takes a moment to boot, well over a minute. I've watched a YouTube video where the system booted in seconds. I have another image of Workbench1.3 on different SD card, it boots in seconds as well. Is it done using software, patches or skilled manipulation of files like boot-sequence, startup-sequence?
My setup:
CDTV KS 3.1, 030 MMU 64MB Fast RAM (TF536), 2GB system partition only (sd2ide), disabled extended rom.
In general, booting an Amiga from an HDD is quite fast, and can certainly be far less than 30 seconds even when a significant number of drivers and small applications are loaded via commands in S:Startup-Sequence.
It should normally take only ~5 seconds to initialize the hardware and see the display of the CLI window (see below about cold vs. warm boot times). From there, the delay in reaching the Workbench screen is determined mainly by the commands you spawn via your Startup-Sequence, with the only essential commands being SetPatch and BindDrivers.
It should be noted that a cold boot will be longer than a warm boot simply because any HD boot ought to be running SetPatch. The inclusion of SetPatch thus adds an extra system initialization sequence lasting ~5 seconds for cold boot only.
BindDrivers is necessary to load Disk-based device drivers if you are using any. This is normally a quick process, unless the device driver has a long initialization process for whatever hardware it is controlling.
If you want to keep things to a minimum, you can follow these two commands with a simple LoadWB and EndCLI. This will completely initialize the system ready for use and the only delay is going to be loading whatever icons from the disk that you use to populate the Workbench desktop. The minimum would be a simple .info file for your HDD.
Of course, you can include as many commands (and sub-scripts!) in your Startup-Sequence as desired. Each one of these will add some delay, even if only simple DOS commands setting up your environment. You can speed up the repeated use of common DOS commands by using the Resident command to keep them in RAM.
c:assign instead of assign to avoid path lookup
Commented
Nov 4, 2020 at 11:18
resident before executing them a bunch of times
With a spare megabyte of RAM you could also install Workbench or equivalent in a resident bootable RAM disk ("RAD:"), so you could boot from RAM with no moving parts.
Of course that will only work for a warm boot/warm start, not the first "cold" boot.
Some details here: https://www.amigareport.com/ar139/p1-6.html
Another factor is the SCSI ID; make sure your HDD is set to 0, and set a lower number than std. in HDToolBox for max. ID, as low as possible, and save the new info to your drive. That way, the SCSI adapter will stop searching for drives as soon as it can, speeding things up a bit.
