Tip: Salvaging AmigaOS 3.9 CD-ROM

[shirsch]

It turns out that my Amiga OS 3.9 CD was burned on CD+RW media of very questionable quality. I noticed it was getting flakey and decided to make an archival copy before it was too late. Unfortunately, it _was_ too late and none of my Linux mastering tools were able to successfully read an image.

Since I was able to mount the ISO filesystem and read the directory, I tried a recursive file-level copy to the local disk. Fortunately, all the bad sectors were associated with the .avi files under /Videos (which I could care less about).

Next move was to master a new ISO image from the captured files. This involved some serious hair-pulling, since a number of the locale files had UTF-8 characters that gave k3b fits. The worst problem was that files starting with '.' were being dropped. The /.backdrop file is essential for properly mounting and presenting the recovery image as a separate pseudo-volume in the Workbench.

To make a long story short, this command line approach finally worked. When the resulting ISO image is burned, it appears to mount correctly and function as the original disc. Naturally the multi-media track (CDDA) is missing but I don't think this affects its use for installation and upgrade.

The magic incantation:

genisoimage -o AmigaOS39.iso -ldots -l -R -V AmigaOS3.9 <dir>

Where <dir> is the root of the copied files.

Hope this saves someone else the grief I went through!

Steve

[adolescent]

You need at least one of the .AVI files for the BoingBag install security check.

Either way, wouldn't it just be easier to find an ISO somewhere out on the internet? BTW, where did you get OS 3.9 on CD+RW? Sounds kind of shady.

[shirsch]

Originally Posted by adolescent

You need at least one of the .AVI files for the BoingBag install security check.

I figured as much. Two of them copied and I left the others as zero-length dummies.

Either way, wouldn't it just be easier to find an ISO somewhere out on the internet? BTW, where did you get OS 3.9 on CD+RW? Sounds kind of shady.

Not shady at all. This was purchased from Software Hut - an authorized distributor. The issue has been covered before in online discussions. They shipped a large number of official CDs in this format and I'm not the only one with a legitimate CD-RW.

And, yes, I'd love to find an uncorrupted image. However, I have zero luck finding such things among 100s of dead torrents and .ru websites that want my credit card number to approve downloads :-)

I do plan to contact the vendor, but have little expectation they will be willing to replace the CD.

[Mike55]

I have 2 ORIGINAL 3.9 CDs. Let me know if you would like one.

[wanderer]

You could try IsoBuster. It has a very smart recovery feature, which allows you to read the disc and complete the recovery on multiple CD/DVD/BD drives, on different computers. It is quite common for some drives to be able to read through errors other drives cannot.

[Minuous]

Originally Posted by shirsch

Next move was to master a new ISO image from the captured files. This involved some serious hair-pulling, since a number of the locale files had UTF-8 characters that gave k3b fits.

Not really UTF-8, just ISO-8859-1 (Latin 1).

The worst problem was that files starting with '.' were being dropped. The /.backdrop file is essential for properly mounting and presenting the recovery image as a separate pseudo-volume in the Workbench.

Sounds like the tool you are using for this has a lot of bugs, maybe you should report these so they can be fixed?

[Hewitson]

Not a bug, in Unix-like OS's files/dirs beginning with a . are hidden. I am sure the software would have a setting regarding these.