RISC OS 5.14 and Memphis

I tried out the RISC OS 5.14 softload quickly yesterday and was bounced straight to a desktop jumping past the Boot sequence. Its usability was stymied by what turned out to be an apparent lack of ADFS so RISC OS could not access the harddisc. Looking into what was going, I discovered ADFS was unplugged and attempting to RMReInit ADFS caused a crash. Today I did some more digging and I found it was due to Memphis having been told to ‘Disable RamFS’. It did this by unplugging RamFS which was ROM module 34 in 5.11; a position occupied by ADFS in 5.14. Unticking ‘Disable RamFS’ in Memphis’s choices plugged RamFS back in and RISC OS 5.14 seems to be running well here now it has its ADFS back.

I thought it best to document my findings here to aid anyone experiencing similar problems, particularly as I had not knowingly unplugged any modules.

Yes – this note should go in future release notes (as other people have found):

Before trying a new ROM image out, make a note of any unplugged modules you have and RMReInit them. In the new ROM, you can Unplug them again.