clone the hard disk

hi guys

I have a question that bothered me long time now

what is the best way to clone an amiga hard disk to another?

thanks

[jmmijo]

Not sure but have you looked at either Quaterback or Quarterback Tools?

[Echo]

I wouldn't mind info on this too.

Currently I back everything up to zip disks, and I've had to restore a couple of times too. Bit slow, but functional.

Luckily, Workbench is nothing like Windows. You can format a new hard drive, do a simple file/folder copy back from a zip disk or two, making sure to preserve the directory structure. Reboot and everything works perfect first time.

Try doing that with Windows and you're likely to get an "NTDLR not found - press any key to reboot"

[Severin]

Originally posted by jmmijo
Not sure but have you looked at either Quaterback or Quarterback Tools?

Aarrrggghhh!!!! NOOOOOOOO!!!

quarterback can cause problems, twice on my system I did a backup with it (without password protection) then when I had to restore it, it asked for a password (bye bye data & bye bye quarterback)...

I used to 'clone' my harddrives, at the time I had 2 western digital 512Mb drives, I set the second one up with identical partition details and just used workbenches diskcopy command...
but to do the the drives MUST have the same cylinder, blocks per track, tracks per cylinder, heads etc...

another way is to get the old 'flat' device from aminet, it allows you to access any drive/partition as a single file and copy it somewhere else.

but the best options are, backup to CD with makecd, or use Diavolo 2000 (much better than quarterback or amiback).

[Bloodwych]

I created my own zip install packs and disks to install them.

Using an amiga archiver, I zipped stuff from within workbench in order to preserve file names and attributes, then shipped them across to my PC for backup. I can install various WB setups, games and utilities with ease on any Amiga HD I choose.

Works a treat, if not a little time consuming.

I have the Amigas networked to the pc with Amiga Explorer. This way the drive can be easily transferred to pc in .hdf format

The size of the file is always the capacity of the HD no matter how empty it might be though. Therefore backing a 20-40 mb drive is no problem but a 2GB one is!

[Severin]

yep, it sure is

that's why I recommend Diavolo, it will preserve the file structure the same as a zip file, it will also XPK (Rake is about the best) the whole partition (or partitions - you can also select specific files/drawers from multiple partitions).

My workbench is roughly 490Mb, diavolo compresses it to around 320Mb

[Bloodwych]

Originally posted by Severin
yep, it sure is

Yep, but I can distribute my Amiga stuff easily like the Classicwb packages on RCKS download page!

The zips are also universally accessible to everyone with it being such a common format, be it in windows or PC directories in WinUAE.

Guess it depends on how you want to use your stored Amiga files.

[ElectroBlaster]

Hey guys I have my amiga hooked up via ethernet using samba! i would like to archive my hard disk! how should i go about it? do i age the drive and store it direct onto the pc??? i could burn the image/s to cd then maybe!

Thanks for the usefull info guys

another one that might be interesting to all of us.

Can we transfer HDF files from Amigaforever lets say to the real Amiga? I mean we can prepare the OS from the emulation and transfer the hdf to AMIGA.

can this be possible?

[Echo]

If you have two hard drives in one system, a simple copy in Workbench will work. Remember, this isn't Windows - it doesn't need any screwing with the hard drive's master file table. Which is why you often get "NTDLR not found" when attempting to clone PC hard disks. The bonus with standard filecopy is, both drives don't need to be of identical size, nor have the same cylinder settings.

When restoring a blank hard drive, I partition it all first, then use Filemaster (left & right columns for drives) to copy file by file from zip disks to the hard drive. This works a treat.

The thing that caught me out when doing it this week, was you must remember to put HD0's boot priority to at least 4. Else you're likely to have issues booting after power on.