Reading an Amiga HD on another system

[minator]

I'm trying to transfer an old 2.5 inch Amiga HD from an A1200 to a Mac.

I got a USB adaptor that plugs into various types of drives and the A1200 drive powers up, but the Mac (of course) doesn't recognise it.
It's not listed when I list the drives so I can't see a way to get it to mount.

AFAIK if I can get the drive to mount something like AmiBerry should then be able to read it.

Anyone had luck trying to do this?

[jotd]

I've started sharing data between WinUAE and the real machine by mounting my real amiga drive using a IDE adapter on PC so yes it's possible.

[hitchhikr]

Don't know about the Macintosh but on Windows one can manipulate Amiga formatted CF cards plugged in USB ports with WinUAE (when launched as administrator) as normal Amiga HD.

[SkulleateR]

Did you try a DISKUTIL LIST in a terminal window if you Amiga HDD is showing up ? I think your drive IS indeed mounted but will not show up because it´s an unknown type

[fgh]

Any computer with the right interface and imaging software can create an image of an amiga drive.

Just make a raw image (= a full bit by bit copy) of the drive, and access it under emulation.

Mac OS X disk utility can do this. Just turn off compression and encryption, and you’ll get a raw image usable anywhere. (It will still default to naming it .dmg but it can be renamed to whatever extension you like)

Many IDE-USB adapters are unable to read very old IDE disks though.
Those adapters only know ‘LBA’ addressing, which very old drives (less than ~4-500MB?) do not know.
If disk utility reports the total size of the drive correctly it will work.

I don’t remember how disk utility shows drives with unfamiliar partition/file systems (like amiga drives).
If it’s not listed anywhere at all, or shows up as size 0 (windows does this) it might be a CHS only (no LBA) drive, and you’ll have to connect it to a computer with an IDE interface, or use the USB adapter on a PC. WinUAE has a magic trick that lets you read drives with these adapters that even windows itself cannot access.

Edit: Not sure what it looks like in recent versions of OS X, but the option to disable compression in the image file was confusingly called ‘Compression: Read/Write’ on my old 10.4 G4.