Amiga 1200 with CF card - safe to just power off at power brick?
 

Hi Guys,

My CF card widget thing arrived today and I have installed it and the amiga and its working very well (so far!) however I was wondering if its safe to still just switch off the miggy using the switch on the power supply or is there a command I should run to shut this baby down?

Cheers
K

No, switching off at the PSU should still work just fine. Always make sure that all drive/card activity has ceased before you do so, but I'm sure you're already doing that anyway.

Cool thanks, another quick question, is it possible to expand the partition size on the amiga, my original drive was approx 500MB in size however the CF card is 1GB and i want to utilise the remaining 500MB however HDtoolbox only shows the drive as it stands and no free space i.e. it thinks its only a 500MB drive.

Cheers

How did you copy the files from your original hard drive to your CF card? Did you achieve this on your Amiga or on your PC under WinUAE?

Was the 500MB partition size chosen so that you could restore an image of your original hard drive to it?

HDToolbox should be able to see the whole CF card capacity and let you create another partition on it to use the remaining space, even if it is not possible to expand the existing partition to achieve this.

I am at a loss to explain why HDToolbox cannot see the CF card's true capacity.

I used the DD command in linux to do a byte for byte copy of the original 500MB drive to a file and then i used DD to write it back out to the CF card. The drive contains 6 partitions and in HDToolbox it shows no free space after the 6th partition... aieeeeeeee

Are there really six partitions on your original Amiga hard drive? Do you still have it?

Does the drive contain anything useful in partitions 2-6? If not, could you not have deleted these partitions before creating the drive image file? It could be these "ghost" partitions which are preventing you from using the remainming CF card capacity.

Yup really six partitions and yep i still have the drive. partitions 2-6 have stuff on i want to keep. I have now opened the drive in Gparted and created a partition in the unused space and left it as unformatted (gparted cant format amiga to affs) hoping that would then become visible back in HDToolbox on the miggy but it hasnt...is there a better way to take an image of a hard drive and drop it on a CF and expand it to use all the space? i would have thought what I had done would work?

I am not aware of a technique to translate the geometry of a hard drive image so that it will use the full capacity of a larger device like your CF card when it is restored.

If I was to tackle the job, I would do it like this:

(1) mount both the hard drive and CF card in the Amiga,
(2) delete the partition(s) on the CF card and either create a new partition to use its full capacity, or create two partitions each using half its capacity,
(3) format the CF card's partitions and use the CLI Install command to make the first partition bootable,
(4) use the CLI Copy command to copy all the files and directories from your original hard drive's boot partition to the boot partition of the CF card,
(5) remove your original hard drive from the Amiga and connect the CF card in its place.

Job done. :)

Ok thanks for your help, ill have to get a pcmcia to CF adapter...ebay here I come again.. :)

Why?

You can connect both devices to the IDE bus; HDD as Master and CF card as Slave. You just need an IDE cable for two devices and possibly a power splitter, depending on the drive and CF-IDE adapter types.

If you have 3.1 disks I would recommend getting the drive formatted / partitioned the way you want with a basic 3.1 install on it first. Make sure Amiga unzip is in the c: directory. Zip up the contents of your old HD in EUAE (running your old HD) and use a second CF card to transfer the ZIP files back to your Amiga. Unzip the partition contents to the waiting CF card hard disk in your 1200. If you don't have a CF card slot / adaptor on your linux box you are making a lot of work for yourself

This is a very similar process to setting up something like ClassicWB which I did all in WINUAE before moving to my real Amiga using CF cards.

http://eab.abime.net/showthread.php?t=19056

Well I finally done it, took a while but i got there in the end. What i ended up doing:

1. formated the CF card on my PC to remove any partitions
2. Put the CF back in the Amiga and booted off the workbench floppy and used HDToolbox off install disk
3. Created the partitions on the CF card in HDToolbox
4. Formatted the partitions using the Format option in workbench
5. Shutdown the Amiga and moved the CF card back to my pc
6. Mounted up the iso image I took of each partition on my original hard drive and copied the data back to the relevant partition.
7. Put the CF card back in the Amiga and crossed my fingers...
8. Worked a treat, i now have a 1GB CF card in my Amiga and its soooo quiet!!

Thanks to all for the suggestions, hope this thread serves to help others, now off to bed :)

Well done, kernoman! :)

And thanks for posting your 'procedure'. :great

Yeah, CF is the same as a harddisk when it comes to power-off. If you want to turn the Amiga off just after saving a file (writing to disk), wait for the OS to write the file and then it steps to the root sector and updates the directory index.

If you're sure it's not writing (reading or idle), just turn it off directly.

Me, I have a routine programmed into my brain, which is to wait 2 secs, reset, and power off while it's resetting.

But the reasons are the same as with floppies and harddisks - it's the OS (and most other OSes as well). You don't want to lose power just as it's writing to the media.

Congratulations! Excellent isn't the CF card a killer way to go?