Read Amiga Harddisk with WinUae

[Toni Wilen]

I bought this: http://www.delock.com/produkte/G_61486/merkmale.html It supports SCSI ATA passthrough = allows to execute ATA commands directly, at least drive identify command returns valid identity data.

Unfortunately I don't have any CHS only drives to test if it needs CHS hack (or new CHS hack via SCSI ATA, it may be too intelligent and validate SCSI command parameters) or if it supports CHS-onlu drives fully.

[Starglider 2]

Hi Toni, this thread has been very interesting. I was recently donated the Team17 Worms development A4000s for my YouTube channel and am in the process of backing up the drives.

But it seems the USB adapter I bought largely doesn't even allow some drives to appear in Windows disk manager. I don't even get 0 size as OP did.

Long story short, to wrap up this thread with the complete solution can you or anyone point to a USB to IDE adapter on Amazon.com that is recommended for this superb WinUAE feature?

Your friend in retro, Perifractic

[Toni Wilen]

Drive manufacturer, model and size?

Common JMicron based USB adapters should work and winuae uses jmicron vendor specific commands to access the disk if drive is CHS-only.

See previous post by mark_k.

[Starglider 2]

Originally Posted by Toni Wilen

Drive manufacturer, model and size?



Common JMicron based USB adapters should work and winuae uses jmicron vendor specific commands to access the disk if drive is CHS-only.



See previous post by mark_k.

Many thanks. All the drives are different, however after some rebooting it started working! I suspect you sent a secret command down the internets didn't you.

[Starglider 2]

Hi Tony, both these drives are recognized by windows drive manager but don't appear in WinUAE. Any suggestions sir? I'm using a JMicron USB adapter by Bipra.

[Toni Wilen]

Originally Posted by Starglider 2

Hi Tony, both these drives are recognized by windows drive manager but don't appear in WinUAE. Any suggestions sir? I'm using a JMicron USB adapter by Bipra.

Do they also have correct size in disk manager or zero size?

Run winuae as administrator with drive connected, click add harddrive, quit, attach winuaebootlog.txt.

[mark_k]

Originally Posted by Toni Wilen

Unfortunately I don't have any CHS only drives to test if it needs CHS hack (or new CHS hack via SCSI ATA, it may be too intelligent and validate SCSI command parameters) or if it supports CHS-onlu drives fully.

I think it's 99.9% certain not to support CHS-only drives via normal READ/WRITE commands.

Adding SAT support to WinUAE couldn't hurt. Probably the majority of modern/USB 3.0 USB-ATA adapters support SAT. Whether all SAT-supporting adapters actually work with CHS-only drives is another matter. Of course you can test CHS access to CHS-and-LBA-capable drives. And people with actual CHS-only drives (I'm sure I have at least a couple somewhere...) could report their results.

[mark_k]

Technical manuals for old IDE drives are quite rare. However Bitsavers does have a couple for Western Digital drives:
Caviar AC160 & AC2120
Caviar AC140 & AC280

Those are for slightly older models than the ones in Starglider 2's pic. After reading them a couple of things caught my eye, which could explain why the JMicron hack method might not work.

In the drive/head register, bits [6:5] specify sector size. And it seems those bits have to be 01 to indicate 512-byte sectors. Later, bit 6 was redefined to indicate LBA mode. The USB adapter firmware always sets bit 6, so the drive could reject any read/write commands it receives. (Most other CHS-only drives probably just ignore bits 5 & 6.)

Access via SAT (or JMicron vendor-specific ATA passthrough) should work.

It might also be necessary to issue INITIALIZE DRIVE PARAMETERS. The manuals don't say either way, but suggest several logical geometries.

Interestingly, the drives have a fixed number of user sectors which is slightly larger than the number covered by the suggested logical geometries. For example the Caviar AC160 has 122091 user sectors. 122091 = 3 × 40697 (prime factors), so it's impossible for a C/H/S geometry to exactly cover all user sectors. I don't know if you could set a geometry to cover more than the number of user sectors and manage to read the last user sectors that way.

Finally, it seems attempting to seek to a cylinder past the end of user sectors causes the drive to park its heads and spin down. I don't know whether that also applies to the implied seek associated with an attempted out-of-bounds read.

[Toni Wilen]

SAT is already used by WinUAE but it seems to be very rarely supported. (Result is logged)

JMicron vendor specific passthrough mode should still work (bit 7 and 5 are set, bit 6 is cleared). Technically no IDE drive should need INITIALIZE DRIVE PARAMETERS but firmware "designed" to work with existing driver code is always possible..

[Starglider 2]

Originally Posted by Toni Wilen

Do they also have correct size in disk manager or zero size?

Run winuae as administrator with drive connected, click add harddrive, quit, attach winuaebootlog.txt.

Hi Toni, the size in Win10 Disk Management is correct:

Disk 1
Unknown
325 MB
Not initialized

Log as requested. Thank you: https://drive.google.com/open?id=17a...VC5ort41viK60X

(Separate question: Have a third Seagate drive that turns off the moment it detects USB, even the second I power up the computer before Windows even loads. Turn off the PC and the drive spins up again. Any ideas anyone?)

[Toni Wilen]

Originally Posted by Starglider 2

Log as requested. Thank you: https://drive.google.com/open?id=17a...VC5ort41viK60X

"hd ignored (out=0 bs=512), read error 1117!"

1117 = ERROR_IO_DEVICE. So something goes wrong, 512 byte read request, returned zero bytes with error 1117.

What does "Read Identity" button (winuae add harddrive panel) return? Copy&paste the output.

(Separate question: Have a third Seagate drive that turns off the moment it detects USB, even the second I power up the computer before Windows even loads. Turn off the PC and the drive spins up again. Any ideas anyone?)

I remember having similar problem with one USB adapter + very old drive. Perhaps this is what mark_k mentioned above, out of range block address = spin down.

[Starglider 2]

Thanks Toni. Just to be clear, the drive does not appear in WinUAE at all therefore I believe it's impossible for me to click Read Identity, as I cannot select the drive. The only drives that appear are the laptop's internal HD and the DVD-RW.

mark_k's post was very interesting.

[mark_k]

Originally Posted by Toni Wilen

SAT is already used by WinUAE but it seems to be very rarely supported.

Looking at readidentity() in hardfile_win32.cpp, it looks like you only use 16-byte SAT for type 5 devices? Could some modern USB adapters support 16-byte SAT but not 12-byte?

Originally Posted by Toni Wilen

JMicron vendor specific passthrough mode should still work (bit 7 and 5 are set, bit 6 is cleared). Technically no IDE drive should need INITIALIZE DRIVE PARAMETERS but firmware "designed" to work with existing driver code is always possible..

From memory, IDE scsi.device in Kickstart checks for Conner CP-2024 and issues INITIALIZE DRIVE PARAMETERS with hard-coded geometry. Maybe all PC BIOSes back in the day issued that command before booting, so a drive which requires that wouldn't have been seen as a problem?