Newbie question re Hard Drives and WB installs

[appiah4]

Can WB installs on one Hard Drive be directly copied onto another via DiskOpus and be booted? More directly: I have a ClassicWB install on an HDF image; if I boot that in WinUAE and add a Compact Flash hard drive as a secondary HD, and copy the HDF contents onto the Compact Flash, will it just work?

Yep! Just format the disk and give it the same label like DH0: if using a workbench pack. You may need to run UAE as an administrator.


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[appiah4]

Ah, perfect! So there's no need to suffer the horror of zipping the whole ClassicWB install and using the ADF image. That sure saves a lot of hassle.

New question: What file system should I use for a CF hard drive? I will be using it on an A500 with 512mb slow mem and an ACA500plus accelerator (14mhz 68EC000 and 8mb fast ram).

[voxel]

don't forget to use hdtoolbox to prepare the cf first, make a partition large enough (or whole size of the cf) for the adf contents, and set the "bootable" switch in the cf rdb or your copy will not boot

[idrougge]

Originally Posted by esc

Yep! Just format the disk and give it the same label like DH0: if using a workbench pack.

Give it a different label or you will run into strange problems.

Sorry but you are mistaken. Format the CF card in winuae and give it the same label as your hdf. Then, in DOPUS for example, copy the contents of your virtual drive onto the CF. Now you can use the CF in a real amiga.

In classicwb, for example, many assigns expect the boot media to be dh0:

What are these strange problems?


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[appiah4]

I think he meant to say "and" instead of "or"?

[E-Penguin]

copy dh0: dh1: all clone quiet

Probably the fastest way, assuming the source disk is DH0: and the destination is DH1:

[idrougge]

Originally Posted by esc

Sorry but you are mistaken. Format the CF card in winuae and give it the same label as your hdf. Then, in DOPUS for example, copy the contents of your virtual drive onto the CF. Now you can use the CF in a real amiga.

How do you even tell the difference between DH0: and DH0: ?

Originally Posted by esc

In classicwb, for example, many assigns expect the boot media to be dh0:

If ClassicWB uses hardcoded drive numbers, then don't use it. It's obviously made by someone with an MS-DOS background.

Originally Posted by esc

What are these strange problems?

AmigaDOS and its programs expect drive labels to be unique, or it doesn't know what you mean when you copy files from DH0: to DH0:

[Pat the Cat]

Yeah, it's two issues. One copying the files (pretty easy) and the other one is setting up the other solid state drive to boot properly.

You nearly ALWAYS have to use the same hard disk utility to prepare BOTH drives, unless you really know what you are doing... so if you don't know what the current drive was formatted with, it can be a case of "prepare 2nd drive with all known Amiga hard drive utilities until the 2nd drive does actually boot".

So it can be a case of "try 'em all". Official CBM HDToolbox and Cyberscsi for the Blizzard scsis are the most common, because they can be used with bigger drives, I think. There are others, like old school Faastprep for GVP controllers. Some of them are mind buggeringly difficult to identify, let alone find a copy of, That is if you are plugging the solid state device (CD or SD or whateverr) into an Amiga via hard disk, it will boot using a "copy" of the ADF. It's possible to fudge it to a certain extent.

Another issue - compact flash drives are NOT hard drives on the Amiga, if connected to the PCMCIA slot I think. You DON'T need to set them up to boot as a hard drive, so they are MUCH easier to plug into an A600 or A1200. They are more like big floppies, and don't have an RDB at all. They have a boot track like a floppy. So if they are formatted right, with a fairly good card.device running them, no hardware issues (PCMCIA port can be dead, y'know) you can install them

Install CC0:

Then they boot (they might not load workbench, but you should get an AmigaDOS prompt at least), if plugged into the PCMCIA at boot. On a real Amiga. An emulator machine will barf trying to startup from the card, because it needs a Host OS to run on. Then it can emulate an Amiga, and simulates booting one.

What you want to plug that compact flash card into, and how it is connected (PCMCIA or hard drive or other) is an issue, if you want it to boot. If that's a classic Amiga, there's a few variations to say the least, before it's good to go.

Quite frankly, having a working Workbench floppy can save you an awful lot of tinkering. Even better, a working and booting Amiga CD-ROM disk and a CD-drive connected to the Amiga to boot from, if only temporarily. That's not expensive to setup, because the A1200 and A600 have BOTH a PCMCIA port and an IDE port. Other machines without native compact flash support have a harder time of it, but generally end up with much bigger solid state drives connected.

[Pat the Cat]

Originally Posted by idrougge

How do you even tell the difference between DH0: and DH0: ?

It depends. Terms like DH0: can be DOS devices for specific hardware, like SER: for the serial port.

In which case, you can rename the disk, and yet still refer to it as

Label: or maybe "My label:" because it has spaces in the name. Or;-

DH0:

because that's the DOS device handle. Assigns can remap any old label to any old DOS device or a different folder inside a disk style of DOS device.

Some Amiga hard drives are setup not to DH0: at all and just go "huh? Insert disk DH0: please" when you try to access them with that handle. If the HDF file is of such an Amiga hard drive system, expect problems with it working properly.

Originally Posted by idrougge

If ClassicWB uses hardcoded drive numbers, then don't use it. It's obviously made by someone with an MS-DOS background.

Well... expect it to operate a bit differently at the very least, true. Not using a utility because of the developers background is kind of like racism or sexism - very stereotypical, prejudiced, and unreasonable. It's the kind of comment I would have spouted a quarter century ago, but the war is over, MS-DOS isn't developed anymore / dead anyway, you can put the bayonets up now people.

Originally Posted by idrougge

AmigaDOS and its programs expect drive labels to be unique, or it doesn't know what you mean when you copy files from DH0: to DH0:

It can indeed be setup that way, ideally, but there is no real telling in advance how an HDF archive is supposed to work without tinkering if it doesn't startup properly. Making sure everything, files and hardware, can be accessed properly with assigns and other commands like Setpatch often has to be done in the startup-sequence to make some resource available prior to loading Workbench, and you are quite right to point out the issue. It's not very noob friendly, but it's very flexible and USEFUL when folks get their heads around it, and can tweak their ASSIGNs so that everything is where the OS can find them AND ALSO WHERE THEY THE USER CHOOSE THOSE RESOURCES TO BE. It's a freedom of choice issue, with responsibilities for the user but infinitely more freedom. Especially when it comes to adding some kinds of new techno hardware to an Amiga.

Microsoft just dump all their system files in one main directory called Windows, and scattered across rootdisks where people can't even see them, let along access them. Totally different approach, you're either a noob user and depend on the system, or the sytem just doesn't work until Microsoft patch it, usually pretty quickly. No middle ground. You depend on the OS supplier. For everything. Ditto Apple, but Apple are still making hardware, and LOTS of it. That's no bad thing, you can connect some items to an Amiga.

UAE will refer to the hdf as DH0: and the CF card's DH0: partition as DH0_0: - copying the files from the hdf to the cf card results in a 100% accurate clone of the hdf. The card will be known as DH0: once it is in a real Amiga. This is simple and foolproof. There is no cause for concern. I've done this dozens of times.

[Pat the Cat]

Originally Posted by esc

UAE will refer to the hdf as DH0: and the CF card's DH0: partition as DH0_0: - copying the files from the hdf to the cf card results in a 100% accurate clone of the hdf. The card will be known as DH0: once it is in a real Amiga. This is simple and foolproof. There is no cause for concern. I've done this dozens of times.

Yeah, but a 100% clone isn't guaranteed to boot as well on a real Amiga. Sometimes you can copy and it will boot, sometimes not, and that depends how the CF connects to the Amiga, and what breed of Amiga it is. And very much, the contents of the HDF... some are just strange. In general, the older they are, the more alien.

UAE of various flavours can do it a lot of ways, I'm sure. But a lot of people are having troubles getting old Amiga archives to BOOT AS WELL from CF or SD or whatever. as well, on resurrected Amiga hardware That's the core of the general situation.

There is another issue too, with resurrection. Sweeping the HDF derived system for malware. If you do use an old magazine Coverdisk CD as a starting point, there's no telling what garbage you end up with. It probably won't be dangerous until you execute some code by clicking icons on the systems, but even so, here be dragons. Malware is rife currently, quite frankly. On a lot of systems worldwide, of many flavours.

You are probably OK with any Amiga release anyway, so long as you steer clear of self booting floppies and third party applications and games or demos of the period. Especially reader sourced product from a magazine. Or public domain software of the period. Not much is infected, in old archives, maybe 1 in 10000 executables or less, I guess. And none of them are "contagious" unless executed.

However, it's out there, and watch out for those sneaky littlebastards

Thanks for the response Pat. FWIW my quoted response embedded in yours above was actually directed at idrougge because I disagree with his advice that naming a CF the same as your hdf is bad. It creates zero problems and has always been quite successful for me.

[idrougge]

Originally Posted by Pat the Cat

Another issue - compact flash drives are NOT hard drives on the Amiga, if connected to the PCMCIA slot I think. You DON'T need to set them up to boot as a hard drive, so they are MUCH easier to plug into an A600 or A1200. They are more like big floppies, and don't have an RDB at all. They have a boot track like a floppy. So if they are formatted right, with a fairly good card.device running them, no hardware issues (PCMCIA port can be dead, y'know) you can install them

Install CC0:

They don't have any boot track and you can't "install CC0:" because they aren't mounted on CC0:. CC0: is for old-style PCMCIA flash and SRAM cards and not for compact flash cards, which instead use CF0: which defaults to using FAT filesystem. You can't install an Amiga bootblock on that, and you can't boot from the anyway since the driver isn't ROM resident.

Originally Posted by Pat the Cat

Then they boot (they might not load workbench, but you should get an AmigaDOS prompt at least), if plugged into the PCMCIA at boot. On a real Amiga.

…and you can't boot from the anyway since the driver isn't ROM resident.

[idrougge]

Originally Posted by esc

UAE will refer to the hdf as DH0: and the CF card's DH0: partition as DH0_0: - copying the files from the hdf to the cf card results in a 100% accurate clone of the hdf. The card will be known as DH0: once it is in a real Amiga. This is simple and foolproof. There is no cause for concern. I've done this dozens of times.

That explains it. Is that UAE behaviour or does AmigaDOS have that as a safety mechanism?

Beats me. But it's the big standard way to use uae to duplicate and hdf.


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[Pat the Cat]

Originally Posted by idrougge

They don't have any boot track and you can't "install CC0:" because they aren't mounted on CC0:. CC0: is for old-style PCMCIA flash and SRAM cards and not for compact flash cards, which instead use CF0: which defaults to using FAT filesystem. You can't install an Amiga bootblock on that, and you can't boot from the anyway since the driver isn't ROM resident.

quote my full response. I said, it depends how the CF attached to the Amiga. If it is going to be attached to a PCMCIA card slot, it makes a difference, does have a boot track, and you can kiss my ass.

Originally Posted by idrougge

…and you can't boot from the anyway since the driver isn't ROM resident.

Uhuh, again, quote my response, it depends where the CF is attached to the Amiga, If it is going to be attached to a PCMCIA card slot, it makes a difference, does have a boot track, and you can kiss my ass.

There is a lot of ambiguity in the OP, don't take it as read that your solid state solution to a booting Amiga from a solid state device is the only one.

[Pat the Cat]

Originally Posted by esc

Beats me. But it's the big standard way to use uae to duplicate and hdf.

Fair enough. If that works OK in WinUAE, at least it copies the disk contents, even if it's just plain wrong on a real Amiga.

Whether it boots on a real Amiga or not, or whether that's what the OP even wanted to happen, are different issues, and at least people are now a bit more aware of what those issue can be.

I'm a big fan of replacing spinning HDs with solid state devices. Less power consumption. Better reliability. Better lifespan.

[idrougge]

Originally Posted by Pat the Cat

quote my full response. I said, it depends how the CF attached to the Amiga. If it is going to be attached to a PCMCIA card slot, it makes a difference, does have a boot track, and you can kiss my ass.

If you've been booting from a compact flash card in the PCMCIA slot with a standard Kickstart ROM, you're the first one to do that, and I think many of us would appreciate a step-by-step guide to do that.
But of course, it's more likely that you've never used a CF card in your Amiga at all.

Originally Posted by Pat the Cat

Uhuh, again, quote my response, it depends where the CF is attached to the Amiga, If it is going to be attached to a PCMCIA card slot, it makes a difference, does have a boot track, and you can kiss my ass.

You didn't even read my reply, did you? The PCMCIA slot is only bootable using CC0, and CC0 doesn't support CF cards. Furthermore, CF cards in the PCMCIA slots use a DOSdriver with FAT filesystem, and hence no Amiga-supported boot track.

Originally Posted by Pat the Cat

There is a lot of ambiguity in the OP, don't take it as read that your solid state solution to a booting Amiga from a solid state device is the only one.

The difference between my solutions and your solution is that yours is purely theoretical.