Read Amiga Harddisk with WinUae

Hello everybody,

I just booted my old Amiga 4000 a couple of days ago and was positively surprised that both harddrives where still working and the Amiga was booting up.

So I just have to backup everything on my PC...a lot of history on those ~500MB

As I found out, the best way to achieve this, is to connect the drive(s) using an USB-Adapter to your PC and use WinUae to boot an Amiga and do the backup.

Now there is my problem: I cannot get WinUae to recognize my harddisks.

There are three behaviours.

Using the latest WinUae, running as normal user, the drive is there ("H3256-A3...") with "ACCESS DENIED", which is normal as I learnt

Using the latest WinUae, running as Administrator, all Windows drives are there, but the Amiga Drive is not listed.

Using an old WinUae 1.61, running as Administrator, my Amiga Drive is there, but with a size of 0k. I can do "Add Harddrive", but it shows with n/a Device, Volume, Block Size and BootPri. It does not boot the Amiga, and when booting with WB 3.1 the drive is not there.

I have the identical behaviour with two drives (IBM 240 and 320MB). The drives work fine in the Amiga, no problems whatsoever. The drives are - as far as I remember - normal FFS and connected to the 4000s IDE Port.

My PC runs Windows 10 Pro 64Bit

Any ideas what could the problem? Help would be greatly appreciated!

Thanks!

[Toni Wilen]

This is "the standard" side-effect (zero size drive or not detected or some weird error in winuaebootlog.txt) when drive is not compatible with USB adapters. Windows Disk Manager most likely also shows it as zero size drive.

Many very old drives unfortunately won't work with (most?) USB adapters.

[Tomislav]

Did somebody tried with IDE to SATA adapter?

[demolition]

Your USB adapter probably only work with UDMA modes and your HDD only has PIO modes.. I had the same problem some time ago but solved it by connecting the HDD to a 44->40 pin adapter and then to an on-board IDE controller in an old PC. Then I was able to dump the disk to an image file using WinImage (which can then be mounted in WinUAE).

Thanks a lot for the updates, very appreciated!

I don't think I have another USB-Adapter to try here, also no IDE to SATA Adapter.

But there should be an old PC around with IDE-Ports, I'm gonna try this one. Fingers crossed

[Sinphaltimus]

I was able to backup my 50MB HDD using Claonto's Amiga Explorer and a null modem cable between the Amiga and PC. So I have an HDF of my HDD but still can't get Win-UAE to boot it up. I'm guessing because it has the original scsi.device for my GVP controller. I don't know how to do any GVP controller emulation in Win-UAE - I think I read someplace it has it but haven't had the opportunity to research enough yet.

However, the hdf created by Amiga Explorer should work by drag and drop back to a real amiga to disaster recovery. Another nice side effect is floppy to adf conversion and being able to copy your real Amiga rom in to a .rom file.

https://www.amigaforever.com/ae/

Either way, I think experimenting with an hdf of your original hard drive is safe that the actual hard drive and if you can figure out how to get the hdf to work, then the same method might work on the real one - lowering risk of losing data on the real one while trying to get it to work directly connected to the Amiga.

Also, another note. I dug up an old SCSI card AHA-2940 not long ago and plugged it into my Windows 10 box with hacked drivers I found. It works. I use it to configure my SD card for the SCSI/SD adaptor now on my A500. I haven't attempted to connect the old 50MB hdd to it and fire up WinUAE but I'm willing to try this weekend and report back if an old SCSI card is in your future. (assuming the A4000 HDDS are SCSI). I also have a spare or two laying around and will beat any ebay final price if you're that inclined.

EDIT: Just offering and throwing some other options out there.

EDIT2: Oh, I see, you need PATA - Maybe one of these?

https://www.amazon.com/XCSOURCE-Expr...pcie+pata+port

[demolition]

Originally Posted by Sinphaltimus

EDIT2: Oh, I see, you need PATA - Maybe one of these?

Many modern controllers does not support PIO modes which is what you need with old HDDs. The one you link to might support it although they only specify UDMA modes in the description.

[Toni Wilen]

PIO is mandatory in ATA specs and ATA drives power up in PIO mode. There is also very old non-UDMA DMA modes that have existed since ages ago that no one ever remembers

Those adapters most likely assume UDMA support and use it even if drive does not support it.

Anyway, mainboard IDE controller (from era when they still existed) practically always work with ancient drives, some really bad drives may need forcing PIO0 in BIOS.

[Sinphaltimus]

Here's one that will work.

Just search Amazon for pcie ata pio controller and read the descriptions/specifications

https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/B000Y...qxL&ref=plSrch

[mark_k]

Maybe some USB-IDE adaptors assume the drive supports LBA access? (Which older drives won't.)

[spaceodyssey]

Hello. Bit old this but I have similar issue with WINUAE.
I have an old amiga hard disk - which in the machine doesn't seem to boot. Connected to PC via USB to SATA/IDE adapter I get same issue as Sabbi. (Sees the drive but access denied, or doesn't see drive in Administrator mode)

Do people think something like this would stand better chance of reading the drive?
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Syba-2-Port...pio+controller

Help much appreciated!

[Toni Wilen]

Check drive size in Windows Disk Manager, common side-effect is drive being detected as zero size.

This was recently mostly confirmed that it happens when drive is CHS-only (LBA was specced but only optional in first IDE specs), all (?) adapters seems to assume LBA support.

Download latest winuae 3.6 beta, run it as admin, select the drive (it should appear in this version), click Read identity button. Does it show inquiry data or open mostly empty screen? (EDIT: and if it does, please include it, just copy&paste the output)

[spaceodyssey]

Ah thanks Toni.
Does indeed show up in windows drive manager as all empty.
And 3.6 beta shows more stuff: Here's output:

BusType: 0x07
Vendor: 'TOSHIBA'
Product: 'MK1722FCV'
Revision: '3 B'
Serial: ''
Size: 0

INQUIRY:
000002011F000000544F5348494241204D4B3137323246435620202020202020 ........TOSHIBA MK1722FCV
33204220 3 B

READ CAPACITY:
FFFFFFFF00000200 ........

INQUIRY 1F:
000002011F000000544F5348494241204D4B3137323246435620202020202020 ........TOSHIBA MK1722FCV
33204220 3 B

[Toni Wilen]

Thanks. READ CAPACITY also shows already noticed side-effect: Drive's number of blocks is FFFFFFFF (= -1)

Unfortunately your adapter does not support SAT (SCSI ATA Passthrough, not sure if there is even any that support it..) so identity data is not available that would exactly tell what methods drive supports.

There is method (at least in theory) that would allow reading data from CHS only drives but I haven't been able to confirm it because I don't have hardware to test it. I can send special winuae version if you want to test it.

Send SCSI READ command to drive with valid CHS value in place of LBA, adapter hopefully converts it to IDE protocol blindly without validation (IDE uses same registers for both LBA and CHS), data coming back should be from selected CHS block.

[mark_k]

JMicron USB-IDE bridge chips are quite common and they implement a vendor-specific ATA passthrough. Smartmontools supports several different vendors' methods. So if you can get a USB converter which uses one of those chips, that would be a possibility.

Hopefully given the READ CAPACITY result, the converter won't block READs (it might if it compares requested LBA with 0 not 0xFFFFFFFF).

Automatic CHS geometry detection could be possible even without IDENTIFY DEVICE data or having the user specify it manually. E.g. issue READs for C/H/S 0/0/0, 0/0/1, 0/0/2, etc.. Then see which 0/0/n READ first returns an error to determine number of sectors/track.

[Toni Wilen]

Originally Posted by mark_k

Automatic CHS geometry detection could be possible even without IDENTIFY DEVICE data or having the user specify it manually. E.g. issue READs for C/H/S 0/0/0, 0/0/1, 0/0/2, etc.. Then see which 0/0/n READ first returns an error to determine number of sectors/track.

I already implemented something like this but I have no idea if it can work.

[spaceodyssey]

Originally Posted by Toni Wilen

Thanks. READ CAPACITY also shows already noticed side-effect: Drive's number of blocks is FFFFFFFF (= -1)

Unfortunately your adapter does not support SAT (SCSI ATA Passthrough, not sure if there is even any that support it..) so identity data is not available that would exactly tell what methods drive supports.

There is method (at least in theory) that would allow reading data from CHS only drives but I haven't been able to confirm it because I don't have hardware to test it. I can send special winuae version if you want to test it.

Send SCSI READ command to drive with valid CHS value in place of LBA, adapter hopefully converts it to IDE protocol blindly without validation (IDE uses same registers for both LBA and CHS), data coming back should be from selected CHS block.

Hi Toni,
I'll give it a go, thanks!
Cheers,
Chris

[Toni Wilen]

I forgot that some extra code is already included. Click Read Identity -button, close winuae, attach winuaebootlog.txt. (should be in same directory as winuae.exe)

Log will include some extra information, including attempt to detect number of heads and sectors.

[spaceodyssey]

Hi,
Here it is.
Drive could of course just be knackered!
Cheers

[Toni Wilen]

Originally Posted by spaceodyssey

Hi,
Here it is.
Drive could of course just be knackered!
Cheers

Log is from first beta, not latest beta. Later version have improved "identity" support.

Drive most likely is fine, it gets detected and name/version string looks normal.