HstWB Imager - New disk imaging tool

[cyberhead97]

Renamed to Hst Imager.

Hst Imager console v1.0.336 released, see post https://eab.abime.net/showpost.php?p...6&postcount=44.

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I have started a new project, which is a disk imaging tool called HstWB Imager. The difference from this to other disk imaging tools is HstWB Imager has focus on selection of available disks and not just ones with drive letters assigned lige Win32DiskImager.
HstWB Imager is also able to read Amiga partition table called Ridig Disk Block and can show an overview of partitions same way partition tools like GParted and EaseUS Partition Master.

It will have following features:
- Read disk to image.
- Write image to disk.
- Convert image format between .img, .hdf and .vhd.
- Create new blank image file in .img, .hdf or .vhd format.
- Verify disk against image file to check if they are equal.
- Optimize image file. Trim image file to what Ridig Disk Block has assigned. With a 16GB image file containing a 4GB Amiga disk, this will be trimmed down from 16GB to 4GB to save unused space.

Why .vhd? It's a virtual disk format, which WinUAE and FS-UAE supports and it only uses diskspace that contains actual data. With a 4GB .img/.hdf it will always be 4GB in file size even when only 1MB is copied to it. With 4GB .vhd 1MB copied data will only be 2-3MB in file size.

HstWB Imager will also work with other image files not related to Amiga, but with Amiga disk and images it's able to do a little extra.

The whole project is an experiment to see what is possible and will define what HstWB Installer v2.0 will look like.

It will be cross platform, so it runs on Windows, macOS, Linux and Raspberry Pi with desktop environment.

Technologies used covers React for user interface, .Net Core for backend and Electron to package it as an app. It will also feature a CLI version for scripting. Everything is open source as HstWB Installer.

Here's a few screenshots of the current UI. Will this be of use for anyone? Maybe you have ideas or suggestions that will make it better?

[ppill]

Looking good!

How about expanding it to a partitioning tool? There's rdbtool from amitools but a gui app that lets you set up a proper RDB image file, sane geometry options and default settings would be great.

Doing it all in WinUAE is a huge hurdle for a lot of people...

[wiz12]

Looks like it will be a very useful tool. I wonder if there could be a "verify image" option to see if there's any corruption or rdb errors in an image?

[cyberhead97]

Originally Posted by ppill

Looking good!

How about expanding it to a partitioning tool? There's rdbtool from amitools but a gui app that lets you set up a proper RDB image file, sane geometry options and default settings would be great.

Doing it all in WinUAE is a huge hurdle for a lot of people...

Interesting idea with rdbtool. If it's possible to pack it as an executable, i can quite easily create a UI for it. If it's a python script then pyexe could be a way of handling it.

[cyberhead97]

Originally Posted by wiz12

Looks like it will be a very useful tool. I wonder if there could be a "verify image" option to see if there's any corruption or rdb errors in an image?

It could be done, but will require running in an emulator. It would be something like clocking verify disk/partitions then it would start WinUAE/FS-UAE which automatically starts a verify tool

[RoC]

Nice surprise !

I vote also for expanding it as a partitioning tool with the rdbtool.

I have been developing two Powershell scripts, which invoke rdbtool and xdftool on WSL to create HDFs starting from “Host Based” WinUAE Directories. One uses only “Amitools” and creates FFS images, while the second is meant for PFS3AIO and uses also a WinUAE session, because rdbtool/xdftool can create PFS3 partitions but not formatting them (FFS is fully supported though).

I could send these two scripts on GitHub (or through email), if this could somehow be of any help to understand the rdbtool options :-)

[cyberhead97]

Originally Posted by RoC

Nice surprise !

I vote also for expanding it as a partitioning tool with the rdbtool.

I have been developing two Powershell scripts, which invoke rdbtool and xdftool on WSL to create HDFs starting from “Host Based” WinUAE Directories. One uses only “Amitools” and creates FFS images, while the second is meant for PFS3AIO and uses also a WinUAE session, because rdbtool/xdftool can create PFS3 partitions but not formatting them (FFS is fully supported though).

I could send these two scripts on GitHub (or through email), if this could somehow be of any help to understand the rdbtool options :-)

I like the idea. Please share what you have at hand, it will be useful for integrating rdbtool.

I do already have a lot of knowledge about Rigid Disk Block and how to parse/read its binary structure. This could also be extended to creating Rigid Disk Blocks like rdbtool.

I would prefer to have as few external dependencies as possible. Either i need to package it for each platform or include an automated setup of it.

[ppill]

Having RDB/Partitioning without relaying on external tool would be cool (that's sort of what I meant in the previous post).

Sane geometry, partitioning, adding filesystems, setting flags, quick format for FFS, PFS, SFS etc.

All-in-one solution without having to use an emulator... would be a great tool!

[RoC]

Ok, tomorrow I will send them

Fully support the idea to reduce/avoid dependencies

[jbenam]

Very nice! It could turn into a fully-fledged partition tool for Amiga hard drives on other platforms, which is something I have wanted for many many years

If it could do stuff like exporting just a single partition and then reimporting it on another disk, it would be perfect

[cyberhead97]

I have thought a lot about adding partitioning functionality and I'm going to add support for this. rdbtool part of amitools is great, but I really don't want the dependencies it has as a requirement to HstWB Imager.

Therefore I going to implement my own RDB library capable of reading and writing RDB. I have already implemented RDB reading functionality, so it should not take long time to implement RDB writing functionality giving me something to test and hack with.

Formatting the partitions will still require WinUAE, FS-UAE or similar Amiga emulator handle formatting. Filesystem handlers are 68000+ code, so reading and writing the filesystem requires a context (Amiga emulator) that can communicate with the filesystem handler. This can be fully automated with a script that formats each partition and stops Amiga emulator afterwards.

I also got a suggestion for creating "hybrid" images meaning an image that has both RDB and MBR. The idea is to have MBR in first sector with a FAT32 partition in last part of the image and RDB in sector 2-16 with partitions DH0: and DH1: (or more) formatted with PFS\3. The Amiga should then be able to read it's devices DH0: and DH1: and at the same time use FAT95 to mount the FAT32 partition making it a neat solution for transfering files for Amiga users without PCMCIA, USB or similar transfer options.

The "hybrid" image is an idea, not tested, but I have already started a small hackaton to first implement RDB writing and tinker with creation of an image that has MBR and RDB.

[RoC]

Sounds a good plan and the hybrid mode is the ice on the cake!

WinUAE works just fine for formatting and could be also expanded to other things.

As a suggestion, would it be possible to add FFS, because at least in one case it is mandatory to use DOS1 (A3000 dual boot) ?
For the rest PFS3 is quite rightly the standard.

[patrik]

Originally Posted by RoC

Sounds a good plan and the hybrid mode is the ice on the cake!

WinUAE works just fine for formatting and could be also expanded to other things.

As a suggestion, would it be possible to add FFS, because at least in one case it is mandatory to use DOS1 (A3000 dual boot) ?
For the rest PFS3 is quite rightly the standard.

You would need to add it for any 1.3 systems as they do not have FFS in ROM.

[RoC]

Filesystems are stored in the RDBs, so using PFS3 even on A500s/68000 is my preferred choice as far as there is the scsi.device in the kickstart (custom 1.3 or standard 2.x and later)

But in the case of A3000 dual boot, FFS DOS\1 is the only option, otherwise the two partitions (WB_1.3 and WB_2.x) do not work with the kickstart 1.4. Maybe the same applies to the A2630 dual boot, but I haven’t tried that.

[cyberhead97]

Big news today !

I finished implementing a RDB creator/writer and with some hex compare of a RDB created with Amiga OS 3.9 HDToolBox I managed to make my own RDB implementation work successfully.

A few screenshots are attached showing WinUAE with a newly created 250MB .hdf with a 100MB PFS3 partition showing up in Workbench as uninitialized and me using pfsformat to quick format it and verify it works.

So creating RDB, partitions, changing flags settings and such is possible. Even idea's of importing and exporting partitions to and from other images is possible .

[RoC]

Wow, already done. This is great.

[dalek]

That is awesome!

[ppill]

The hybrid thing is pretty straightforward.

RDB is expected to start within the first 16 blocks (0-15). MBR is always(?) block 0. As long as it starts somewhere in the first 16 blocks and ends before the starting cylinder of the first partition it's all good.

HDInstools has a tooltype RDBLOW which defines RDB's starting block. I've used it on a couple of drives and worked fine.

[cyberhead97]

Originally Posted by ppill

The hybrid thing is pretty straightforward.

RDB is expected to start within the first 16 blocks (0-15). MBR is always(?) block 0. As long as it starts somewhere in the first 16 blocks and ends before the starting cylinder of the first partition it's all good.

HDInstools has a tooltype RDBLOW which defines RDB's starting block. I've used it on a couple of drives and worked fine.

That's exactly how I planned it should work. With the recent increased knowledge about RDB, I could also create an RDB mover/relocate tool allowing RDB to be moved between any of the first 16 blocks. Probably only needed in advanced use cases.

I would also like to have filesystem repair tools automatically run by clicking a button and include tools like pfsdoctor.

What tools are used for FFS and SFS partitions which support partitions larger than 2/4GB?

[RoC]

I have only used pfsdoctor, don’t know if DiskDoctor could help you with FFS