Mounting Amiga HD in linux or windows

[Zedrick]

Hi.

I haven't had a real amiga for a few years, but got one for free last month - a recycling room find. It's an Amiga 1200 with HD and GVP A1230 Turbo+ Series II (yes. thrown away in the trash.)

Anyway, I have now sourced PSU and RCA->scart cables, but still no mouse. I assumed it was thrown away because something was broken, but it boots up just fine and gets to here:



Since I have no idea what the login is, I want to make a copy of the drive or at least mount it to take a look at the files, and here's where I run in to trouble. I connected it to a IDE/SATA->USB3.0 interface which works fine (I can read other IDE NTFS drives through it), but it's not found at all in Windows, and while it shows up as /dev/sdf in Linux, mount, parted or even dd totally hangs with no IO activity. I've played around with the jumper settings at bit, but it doesn't do much except turning off all activity so that I can boot the computer while having the drive plugged in (when set as cable select + some other things the bios just hangs).

Any suggestions? I also tried using the amiga as powersource instead of the USB adapter, but the problem isn't there either. Oh, the HD is a Caviar 2850.

[Toni Wilen]

It probably is the common problem: very old IDE drives are not compatible with USB adapters.

[demolition]

Can't you boot into the shell by disabling SS in the pre-boot screen? Then you should be able to browse it. If you have a PCMCIA adapter with CF card and the proper drivers you can image the HDD to a file on the CF card using the Amiga if the drive is too old for your USB adapters.

[Locutus]

This is probably not the reason it fails (sounds like something further down the stack) but make sure you are running a kernel and gparted built with RDB support.

[thomas]

Originally Posted by Zedrick

Since I have no idea what the login is

I don't remember if MultiUserFileSystem actually encrypts the data. If it does, then you need the password, otherwise the data is lost.

If the data is not encrypted you should be able to change the DosType of the partition from MUFS to FFS with HDToolbox.

Originally Posted by demolition

Can't you boot into the shell by disabling SS in the pre-boot screen?

No, you can't. MultiUser acts at the file system level, it is not only a program in Startup-Sequence which can be disabled easily.

[Zedrick]

Originally Posted by Toni Wilen

It probably is the common problem: very old IDE drives are not compatible with USB adapters.

The adapter claims to be able to handle everything, but yeah... That's a likely explaination. Unfortunately my MB is too modern for IDE, so I'll ... maybe I can try it with my somewhat outdated work computer on monday.

Originally Posted by demolition

Can't you boot into the shell by disabling SS in the pre-boot screen?

A bit embarrassing, but I don't know/remember how to interrupt the startup sequence. Control + something?

Thanks for the replies!

[Locutus]

hold both mouse buttons on poweron -> select no startup sequence.

[Zedrick]

Hi again. Since last time I managed to copy the drive (using my grandmothers old computer, with a real IDE-interface) and use it in WinUAE (still no proper monitor for the real Amiga). But I would like to boot from it, and for that I need to see or replace the multiuser password. Btw, yes, the drive is MultiUserFileSystem. The filesystem itself is not encrypted, but I guess the password file is. Any idea where it's located?