using /making areal amiga harddrive

[bugsymalone666]

Ok so this is 2 part, i have a SCSI harddrive that is formated with a fat file system and i have one from an amiga, i have an old PC which is 200mhz and i have managed to fit an adaptec isa SCSI card, but i want to use winuae to format the SCSI fatfilesystem hd and wanted to save the data from the old harddrive. I have tried to do some research how to do it, but couldnt seem to make it work.

I must admit i am running windows ME and a 200mhz PC ain't the best, but its the tool i have for the job, meaning i have winuae 0.9

Any advice on how to go about getting this to work?

[Toni Wilen]

It is not going to work, sorry.

Direct harddrive access is only supported in Windows 2000 and later NT based Windows versions. (XP SP3 is minimum in newer versions)

[bugsymalone666]

Doh!

I wonder if I might be able to blag a copy of NT to install from our IT guys at work, If not I am wondering if I have any other kit with an ISA slot for my current scsi setup, id rather not buy any more kit.

I take it its totally possible then if I say have windows xp I can just plug in the hard drives and access them through winuae?

Cheers

[Boltar]

I've never done it in Windows, but I can access Amiga formatted hard drives directly in Linux, all I need to do is mount the partition and have the required file system (FFS). You might be able to do it with a Live CD/DVD Linux distro and a bit of playing around.

[Toni Wilen]

Don't install AmigaOS using host OS filesystem, you will lose important (Amiga-only) protection flags and get confusing errors sooner or later.

[Boltar]

Toni, are the hard drive image files WinUAE uses simply binary images of a partition? Could he take a direct image of the partition without mounting it. So if he booted from a live CD and mountd his SCSI FAT drive to say /fat then did

cat >/fat/hdimage.bin /dev/sdb1

(where sdb1 is the first parition of the amiga HDD), would that image file then be usable in WinUAE as an RDB HDF?

EDIT: NO scratch that, they're drive images not partition images, sorry.

[Toni Wilen]

If you only want to make HD image of existing Amiga formatted (or any formatted drive actually), any live CD should work fine.

Mount the target drive (or USB memory), use dd to make the image. dd if=/dev/sdb of=/path/to/target/image.hdf

(replace sdb with correct device)

[bugsymalone666]

Well I have so far found it a bit of an issue to even get Linux to work on this PC because its so old and getting a distro to work on it seems to take some doing. The guys at work are going to look for NT4 for me.

Surely if the hard drive has been low level formatted using the scsi controller and is a blank disk, winuae should still be able to see it but you'd need to format it? Would it though format it with the windows format or with an amiga one?

I have been trying to install workbench through my Amiga, however as I only have an Raspberry pi floppy drive replacement, its having problems swapping the disks about, although I figured this might also be a problem with win UAE as there is only 4 drives, or is there another way of doing it?

[Jope]

So it's totally out of the question to get an almost free core2duo PC with an XP license from some recycling centre and use that?

If you go with NT4 you'll have to hunt down some old version of WinUAE..

[Toni Wilen]

I don't think WinUAE works in NT4. (At least not without some unofficial updates?). Windows 2000 was first "officially" WinUAE supported NT based Windows version.

[bugsymalone666]

I have kind of given up a little at the minute, I dont need any more equipment as i dont have any more space, I guess I am just trying to recycle some old kit to recycle some old kit lol.

Whats annoying is one of my PCs from around 2003 had ISA and enough power to run all the right stuff and I skipped that (1100mhz too!) yet I still seem to have my first PC lol.

Tried installing things the old fashioned way by actually using the Amiga, it kind aworks, but not great which is why I thought it would be more efficent to build an amiga hard drive using winUAE. I think I may stop being a cheapskate and get a cheap PCI scsi card off ebay and put that in my current PC.

[PeterK]

Did you already install the Windows ASPI drivers for the Adaptec SCSI support. That is required for older WinUAE versions to support SCSI drives AFAIK. The old WinUAE configurations need a setting to use the ASPI SCSI layer under the Misc Tab in the GUI or "win32.aspi=true" in the config file.

[Toni Wilen]

ASPI was only needed for SCSI passthrough access when using ATAPI or SCSI CD or other non-HD true SCSI devices. HD access never needed it. (It would not have worked)