Imaging internal harddrive to HDF file using TSGui Help?

[ProdigalAmigan]

Hello everyone!

I've started looking at ways to back up/image my CompactFlash harddrive in my Amiga 1200 without having to take the physical CF card out everytime (and opening up the Amiga), and yesterday I tried to create a HDF file of my System partition (the most important part to back up in case anything goes bad) to a PCMCIA-CF-Card adapter.

The CF card used as a harddrive is 32 GB total size, 3 partitions and PFS3 AIO file system.

It seem to have worked fine (took about 25 minutes and resulted in a 1 GB HDF file), then took the file to the PC, and attempted to boot it up under WinUAE, but it does not work at all. I get an AmigaDOS prompt with no commands available to type.

.... can someone please tell me what I am doing wrong? Would be wonderful to have a good way of backing up the Amiga in this way if it can be made to work...

Kindest regards,
ProdigalAmigan.

P.S If this got posted in the wrong place on the board, will some admin please put it where it's supposed to go...

[idrougge]

The problem is that you use PFS. WinUAE has no idea about this, so you need to tell the emulator that it is a PFS partition and supply the pfs3_aio_handler to the emulator.

[ProdigalAmigan]

Originally Posted by idrougge

The problem is that you use PFS. WinUAE has no idea about this, so you need to tell the emulator that it is a PFS partition and supply the pfs3_aio_handler to the emulator.

Thanks so much for the information, would you be able to tell me how to make WinUAE aware of the partition being PFS? I understand I need the 'handler' file for this to happen but where do I "feed it into" WinUAE?

[mark_k]

Copy the PFS3 file somewhere on your PC HD then select it in the FileSys box in Hardfile Settings.

Also, could you upload/attach your WinUAE config file?

[ProdigalAmigan]

Originally Posted by mark_k

Copy the PFS3 file somewhere on your PC HD then select it in the FileSys box in Hardfile Settings.

Also, could you upload/attach your WinUAE config file?

Thanks a lot for your help and good suggestion!

Ha ha after trying to make the HDF file over again with TSGui, I have sort of come to the conclusion that it seems to be highly unstable.

I discovered this when I tried to write an ADF file using it (to floppy) and after it was done doing that and I tried rebooting and booting from the just made floppy I got many read errors from it. Also while running TSGui and inserting an empty floppy in either of my floppydrives (DF0/DF1/DF2) they made ...weird sounds when inserted.

Now you may say that this is stupidity on my part but when not using TSGui all floppy drives operate normally without weird noises. And when I transferred that ADF file onto a floppy using ADFBlitzer 3.0 the resulting floppy booted perfectly with no read/write errors whatsoever...

So I don't think I should be using this software to make HD images.

I have found a way of making backups using LHA instead which I think I will try using. I will be doing some "dry runs" on WinUAE first before I try it on my actual Amiga 1200 to make sure it really works.

I keep forgetting that on the Amiga there isn't so much (or any) extra information that needs to go with the files for to make a perfectly restorable backup onto a new CF card or harddrive in case of failure (much like MS-DOS 6.x and Windows 3.x) ...

If anyone knows of an alternative Amiga software that can dump harddrive partitions to HDF files I'm all ears. I feel like it would be extremely convenient. But if not I will be using the Lha method....