what Is The Best Way To Clone AMIGA Hard Disk's?

[Rich M]

I have just bought an A1200 with 1,4GB Hard Disk That's already customised to my specs which includes loads of PD games, apps and drivers.

I want to take precautional measures that is to clone the hard disk so that in case of any hardware defect i can pretty much immediately put in the second hdd having the same contents as the original.

how do I go about doing this cloning process? does it work using PC style cloning or any steps necessary be done for amiga hdd format?

Thanks

richiro

[AMIGAZ]

Originally Posted by Rich M

I have just bought an A1200 with 1,4GB Hard Disk That's already customised to my specs which includes loads of PD games, apps and drivers.

I want to take precautional measures that is to clone the hard disk so that in case of any hardware defect i can pretty much immediately put in the second hdd having the same contents as the original.

how do I go about doing this cloning process? does it work using PC style cloning or any steps necessary be done for amiga hdd format?

Thanks

richiro

Well, I would choose these two methods:

Put the hd in your PC and use Winuae and copy the contents to your PC so you can copy the stuff back to another hd and use in your amiga

This depends on what kind of amiga you have and if you can connect two hd's to it if that's the case you can just copy everything on the workbench partition to a partition on the other hd and then make that partition bootable

[Rich M]

Thanks for the suggestion
I think the first option, which is to connect the amiga HD onto my pc and use cloanto amiga forever 6.0 winaue to copy the contents is the easiest for me.

Actually, I have been thinking of another way..
since the seller of this A1200 I bought from, said the amiga 1200 will read Compact Flash on PCMCIA.

perhaps I can just pop in a 2GB compact flash on to the PCMCIA port and transfer the whole (1.4GB) amiga HDD on to the Compact flash card.

that is IF the A1200 will read the 2GB in its entirety though, It might be that the A1200 will only recognized 1GB space on that compact flash

[D-Dan]

Ermm - plug both HDs in to an Amiga
Partition 2nd HD with HD toolbox, same sizes an bootable status as the orig. Format each
Open a shell and for each partition type copy DH0:#? NDH0:
where DH0: is the source partition and NDH0: is the destination partition.
Job done.

[Jope]

copy source:#? destination: all clone quiet

all and clone are important to preserve the files in the same order and with the correct protection bits + comments.

[mtb]

Originally Posted by Rich M

I have just bought an A1200 with 1,4GB Hard Disk That's already customised to my specs which includes loads of PD games, apps and drivers.

I want to take precautional measures that is to clone the hard disk so that in case of any hardware defect i can pretty much immediately put in the second hdd having the same contents as the original.

how do I go about doing this cloning process? does it work using PC style cloning or any steps necessary be done for amiga hdd format?

Thanks

richiro

I suggest you another way, imo the safer:

Unplug the hd, then mount it in a pc.

Make an image of the filesystem, with for example linux dd ( you can use a live cd like knoppix in order to do so ), or [ should work ] norton ghost.

This way you'll preserve everything [ file permissions included ], and if you need to come back to the point it will take few minutes and no stress at all.

For a friend of mine i have done this way with a Windows XP image, loosing ~5 gb of disk space. After a pair of months, Xp took over.

In only 10 minutes it worked like a newly installed one.

If it takes too much space you can always compress it and put it on a cdr ( maybe 800 / 900 mb if they are reliable ).

[D-Dan]

@ Jope - Quite right - I stand corrected

@mtb - Why is that safer? - copying from one HD to another on Amiga is non-destructive.

[§ane]

I say Cloanto's Amiga Explorer (you have AF, you have this) to HDF over TCP/IP or Serial (long wait). Done.

[Amiga1992]

THread more suited to App Problems, therefore, moved.

[mtb]

@mtb - Why is that safer? - copying from one HD to another on Amiga is non-destructive.

Unless there are problem with copy and permissions, on Amiga it's ok. You are right.
But creating an image imo is still the best thing you can do.
If also you put it on a cd, it's even better and safer than data in an old hd.

With such an image you can also use it in uae with jit on the pc.

[Codetapper]

The beauty of the Amiga is that you don't have all these (partially) hidden, invisible, system files and registry bollocks to worry about, so backing up an Amiga HD is a piece of cake. It doesn't matter if the source and destination drives are different sizes either, as long as they have enough room to fit the files you are fine. Therefore almost any method mentioned above will be fine. After all, it's basically just a big file copy operation.