what would be the steps involved in using real amiga FS on usb HDD on PC emu?

[dword]

Hiya this isnt really urgent for the time being but heres my situation, I have a 120GB lacie USB HDD, lets say I use partition magic and create say 5GB partition, Ok so this partition is raw, next get some tool to format a partition to an amiga filesystem. Next register that 5GB AFS partition in winuae as a seperate but real amiga drive. So I have my 1gig flash drive for my workbench etc , which uses classic cf workbench lite and I now have this other drive , say DH1 which I can use to install and run all programs on my emulated amiga only rather than an HDF file Im as far as winuae is concerned using a real AFS on a usb hard drive. Is what Im saying possible? Also if I formatted a usb drive with an AFS it would never be the case that this would physically damage it so I could never re-format or reread?

I would still love to get something like this working, actually thought about getting my 1gb lacie HDD to work with my real amiga but Im guessing that would cost more money which I dont have at the momment, still its all possibilitys and I plan to be using amigas for a while. One of my friends is also sold on the idea and hes retro gaming as well

[thomas]

It is possible. You have to create a partition of type 0x76. This can then be used like a real HDD in WinUAE. You probably have to use Linux' fdisk to change the partition type.

But I don't see any benefit in this.

Partition access is much slower than a HDF. Windows does a lot of buffering for file I/O while access to the partition is always direct and unbuffered.

No other program but WinUAE and Amithlon can access such a partition. A HDF could even be mounted as a virtual drive on an Amiga.

You cannot easily backup that partition except from inside WinUAE or Amithlon. A HDF can simply be packed into a ZIP archive and copied to another place for backup.

Some operating systems cannot handle partitioned USB drives. So perhaps your HDD will not be recognised by all computers.

IMHO it's not worth the effort. A HDF is much easier to use and has a lot more benefits than a partition.

[smoorke]

http://eab.abime.net/showthread.php?p=403494
Has more info on this.

[dword]

Thanks yeah I will take your advice then Its just I followed a guide to setup the cf workbench and that created an hdf, so Im not 100% on what I do , i.e just create an hdf of what a raw HDD part on my usb and format it i.e the hdf in winuae? then install workbench etc to the hdf, say I was starting from scratxh and wanted specific items only i.e just my own on the hdf. I want to get competant using my own HDFs so I have complete control, I will check that link out tommorow and I 100% going to take both you input and change to researching about hdfs

Thanks!