Imageing Amiga Hard drives
 

Hi guys.

I'm back in .nz for a short while and need to image my harddrives.

Problem 1, is my external USB->2.5" IDE HDD is broken, so I can't take it out of the case and connect it to the HDD's.

Problem 2, I can't find a 2.5" IDE male to 2.5" IDE Female chord in my local computer shops to plug it into the my USB 2.5" IDE HDD case to connect to my amiga HDD's.

Is there a utility for the A1200 standard? I have a IDE->CF 1GB CF card and the hard drives I need to image are 3x40mb IDE internal drives and 1 1x580mb IDE external drive.

Most drives have 2 partions on it, will WinUAE still be able to detect it when I add it to WinUAE.

Thanks in advance.

I personally use one of these, connects pata 2.5/3.5" and sata drives. One connected via usb, add the HD in Winuae and make an HDF image of it.

http://www.amazon.co.uk/IOMAX-SATA-A...0777814&sr=8-2

It has been reported many times that (most? all?) USB adapters have compatibility problems with "ancient" IDE drives.

Mainboard IDE works but some buggy drives require forced PIO setting in BIOS.

Number of partitions won't matter.

I must be the lucky one with this.

I have quite a few "ancient" 3.5" ide drives which I now use for storage. They all boot first time and never report any read/write errors.

I can even attach an Amiga Formated CF HD from the Amiga and use WinUAE to install WB and partition it no problem.

I can even attach a Fat formated CF HD from an easyADF PCMCIA adapter and tick 'Include removeable drives' and it shows up fine.

So I would have to say most USB adapters may have compatibility problems, but not this one.

If you have EasADF, it has a backup utility to backup from HDD to CF card.

Arnie: there is no way that part is going to make the shores of .nz in time :(. I was just hoping that there was some util that opened the harddrive.device and sector dumped everything to a file like transdisk.

I'll look at EasADF.

There are many of them. One being tsgui, latest version here. The latter even has a restart option which allows you to reboot if the machine hangs because of read errors, skip some unreadable sectors and then resume the operation.

Have I understood some of the comments in this thread correctly... Can I use WinUAE to make like an image of my CF card hard drive? I have already successfully set up WinUAE to be able to boot from and fully access the CF card hard drive when connected to my PC (which still impresses me greatly - WinUAE is ace!).

Yes,

This is what I normally do, create a blank hdf, then copy all the data from real hdd to HDF.
The other way, is to use toni's backup feature in WinUAE (I never used it yet).
If I dont need to remove my HDD, then I just use EasyADF to backup HDD to zip file on my CF card (via PCMCIA slot).

That's excellent. If Toni's backup feature in WinUAE is automated I will have to give it a go! Is there any documentation or How2s for it anywhere?

Click Add Harddrive (you may need administrator privileges if Vista or newer), select drive, click "Create hard disk image file". Result is 1:1 hdf image.

I have used this to backup HD's, CF cards etc. Works a treat.

BTW, Is there any software to enable writing back the images to HD's or CF?

CLI is your friend, ;).

http://eab.abime.net/showpost.php?p=784375&postcount=7

You need a CF or HD which has exactly the same size as the original drive. You may use bigger drives, but you will lose the additional space. The new drive will be partitioned exactly the same way as the original one.

That's absolutely brilliant. I will be trying this out as soon as I have some spare time.

For cloning or backup P.D. Image Creator is an option for Windows. (170kb)
I've used it to create and restore images of several SD cards.

Thanks Thomas & fgh, i'll give those a try.

Image creation failed
 

Hi, just tried to image a CF card with the built in UAE tool and got the following message from winUAE.

hard drive image file creation failed
errorcode 4:0.

However, the file does get created and seems to work. It boots workbench and I can load a whdload game. Repeating the imaging yields the same error and an identical file. False alarm or something to worry about?