KCS Power PC - access the pc partition from the Amiga side?

[E-Penguin]

After quite some effort I have the kcs power PC board (plus) working on my A500 plus / A590, with an scsi2sd providing two virtual scsi units, unit 0 for the Amiga (DH0, DH1) and unit 1 (DH2) for the pc bit. This works well enough, I can install DOS 5, Windows 3, etc.

But it's an arse to get data to / from the pc partition. I use a gotek to shuffle stuff across, one 720KB image at a time. The Amiga has a plipbox on it so I'm used to having ready access to samba shares, aminet and so on.

It would be great if I could somehow mount DH2 in workbench so that I can get at the data on it.

Things I have tried :
Creating a mount list for fat95 for scsi unit 1 - no luck, 'info' says no disk in drive or similar

Using crossdos 7.04 to create a dos partition - nope, PC board can't see any harddrive

Crossdos to create a DOSDriver mount for the existing amiga partition - as with fat95

There's definitely data stored on the dos partition, but it's not seen at all from the Amiga side. I'm sure it's a matter of clever mount list creation but I can't work it out.

Has anyone had any success with this? I can find no documentation about how the pc board uses the disk. I suppose I could image the sd card with dd and go at it with a hex editor to find the DOS MBR but frankly unless it said "MBR" in ASCII I would be able to spot it. Even if I did work out where it started I'm not sure how to translate that into a usable Amiga mount list.

All suggestions gratefully received.

[lesta_smsc]

Not sure about the way you want but if it helps, you can do the other way using Amiga Explorer on PC to see the Amiga side and transfer to and from both this way.

[E-Penguin]

Transfer to the Amiga isn't a problem (it's got an Ethernet adaptor), transfer amiga <-> PC partition is the trick I'm after.

I'm going to go at it with a hex editor I think

[utri007]

Originally Posted by E-Penguin

After quite some effort I have the kcs power PC board (plus) working on my A500 plus / A590, with an scsi2sd providing two virtual scsi units, unit 0 for the Amiga (DH0, DH1) and unit 1 (DH2) for the pc bit. This works well enough, I can install DOS 5, Windows 3, etc.

I have also a kcs power PC board, supported SCSI hd controller GVP 8HD+ and scsi2sd.

I haven't get Power PC board work with hard drive. How did you get it work?

[E-Penguin]

A tiny tiny harddisk (not just partition). I used the scsi2sd to create two virtual disks, scsi id 0 and 1 respectively. scsi disk 1 is 115mb, which works. When I was using just an Amiga partition on a large disk, the pc side just hung as soon as it tried to access it.

I also found the scsi2sd was incorrectly sizing the number of sectors on the disk so I got out my calculator and did the sums myself.

EG for a 2GB sd card you should have (2 * 1000 * 1000 * 1000) / 512 sectors. Make sure the sum of the sectors allocated in both devices doesn't exceed that number. Probably that under-allocates sectors but it does at least work.

[E-Penguin]

After examining a dump of the hard disk image and searching through the hex to find MBRs and VBRs, it looks as if everything written by the KCS Power Board is byte-swapped. So fat95, crossdos, etc can't read it.

I took a look at the fat95 source, wondering if I could add a byte-swap somewhere - it's ASM which is beyond me.

[bikernutz]

Old query I know. however, All my Amiga's have taken a turn for the worse (fatal) in my attic. So I am using fs-uae and winuae depending on my computer in use. My old SCSI drive had 4 partitions. When I imaged it the emulators could see all the partitions but not run the KCS partition as it obviously doesn't have the hardware there anymore.
To access all the data from the 2 amiga partitions, GVP286 partition and KCS partition. All bar the KCS partition could be accessed in Linux by using as sudo in a terminal losetup -Pf amiga.img . they could then be mounted as sudo mount -t AFFS /mnt/loop0p1 up to loop0p4 for the 4th partition.
The KCS partition still couldn't be read.

Gparted showed all 4 partitions as unknown format so was no good to access the data.

However, in a terminal I found using sudo testdisk /dev/loop0p2 (the KCS partition) worked.
the files could all be seen and extracted/copied to another folder and seen in the Amiga emulator or the Linux host.

Using the real Amiga's when they were alive I used either twin-express to copy to another Amiga/PC and then back again. Or after I had bought DOS 6.0 I would use Interlnk and Intersvr using either a null modem or a parallel coms lead.

It worked really well at the time. I even used it to copy the Win95 setup files to a boss one time who wanted to install it on his own computer which had no CD drive using my A570. The parallel lead made file transfer between Amiga/PC/Amiga pain free using interlnk/intersvr.

The same method worked for accessing the hardfile used in pctask. Having extracted the partitions from my amiga.img I found that using loop device in Linux on the hardfile was able to read and access all the files within the hardfile (pctask c drive).
twin-express understands to some extent long filenames from the Amiga side but only 8.3 filenames on the DOS side. Though it still works on windows 95 and newer with dosbox if needed.

[E-Penguin]

Ah so there is hope in being able to read it somehow. Did you get write access to the KCS partition? Setting it up with 720kb disks is an absolute PITA