A7000 w/RISC OS 3.60

I have acquired an old Acorn A7000 from a local school, that came complete with ClassWorks II (essentially a locked-down copy of RISC OS with several educational apps installed). However, after a power faliure part-way through boot-up, the entire set of apps disappeared and the hard drive changed name to “4”. Obviously a corrupt hard drive (the OS even complains during bootup).

I would like to know if it is possible to upgrade the OS to a later version (i.e. 4 or 5) and install a set of freeware and/or open source apps onto a new hard drive without major hardware surgery.

Cheers in advance, P-C

You should be able to upgrade the OS, no problems, check out:

http://select.riscos.com/RISCOS6/faq.html

This might be a bit pricey, will cost more than the computer itself, so maybe check out eBay for RISC OS 4 ROMs, which will be much less expensive. If you later decide to upgrade from 4 to 6, you can do that.

There is not much Open Source software for RISC OS, but a fair bit of freeware, how much of it will suit you really depends on your needs.

Cheers

Garry

For how to revive what you’ve got, try reading this guide: http://www.snowstone.org.uk/riscos/documents/newold.html

Many thanks for your replies. I was a bit confused at the open source RISC OS 5 and shared source 4/6, but now that I understand that upgrading will cost money as opposed to downloading a new image, I’ve decided to stay with 3.60 and use the guide at Snowstone.

Thank you.

Er, that’s not quite right. Just to avoid further confusion, RISC OS 4 and RISC OS 6 are neither open source nor shared source – they are both commercial products of RISCOS Ltd which is not affiliated with RISC OS Open Ltd in any way. We describe RISC OS 5 as shared source, as the term “open source” is generally understood to mean software which is licenced under one of the licences approved by the Open Source Initiative , which RISC OS 5 is not. It is possible that RISC OS 5 will in future be released for the A7000, in which case it will not be a chargeable upgrade.