Amiga: (Almost) dead hard disk

carlsson · Post by **carlsson** » Sat Sep 03, 2005 5:53 am

Hm, an interesting idea. I suppose LhA internally on the Amiga will keep file permissions, comments, file names, directory structures and so on. Since the new hard disk is twice the size of the old one, it would work to dump a such archive onto the disk and later extract it.

Currently I'm toying with ADFLib. It says it is not possible to duplicate a whole hard disk partition onto a new disk due to some headers will be missing, but my idea was to make a file by file copier that preserves all associated data. Unless I'm overlooking something, it seems odd that the only way to externally restore the contents of a hard disk backup would be to run UAE under Windows 2000.

carlsson · Post by **carlsson** » Fri Oct 27, 2006 6:35 am

Fast forward 13.5 months later...

During the past year, I found that E-UAE can mount physical hard disks in Linux (I don't think E-UAE can be compiled for Windows 98SE). However, in the middle of compiling it, some components in the operating system were missing so I tried to upgrade Debian Linux. To make a long story short, the upgrade mangled my Linux installation beyond comprehension.

Since then, I re-installed a newer release of Debian and got the emulator working. I connected the 127 MB replacement disk and planned to restore the backup. Somewhere in the middle of swapping the disk back and forth between the PC and Amiga, it stopped working!

For a while, I've been scanning the online auctions for a reasonably priced, small 2.5" IDE hard disk. I simply refuse to pay $20 for an IBM 80 MB disk

or $50 for a 4 GB ditto. Last week a guy listed a dozen hard disks ranging from 61 to 800 MB with starting bids of 10-30 SEK (eq. $1.50 - $4). Previously I lost the bidding for a low priced 1 GB disk, but this time there were no late minute snipers, so I won the 800 MB disk. Perhaps it was overkill since I had a 60 MB disk previously, but why should I buy a 125-500 MB disk if I can get more for almost the same price...

So, it arrived yesterday. It makes a creaking sound upon power-up, but otherwise runs silent and nice. I made three partitions: 20 MB for system, 80 MB for applications and data and the other 670 MB empty (perhaps for Linux at some point?). After making the partitions on the Amiga, I attached it to my PC and mounted the partitions in Linux. I found that since the partitions are mounted as root, I should run E-UAE as root as well in order to be able to write to the disk. Perhaps I could get around this by changing permissions, but it was the easiest solution. From within the emulator, I could boot from the backup image, and drag'n'drop all the contents to the new disk partitions. Sweet.

Finally I have a working Amiga 1200HD again.

It took almost 1.5 years and cost me a total of 86 SEK ($12) for the 3.5" to 2.5" adapter and a new hard disk. Not counting the hours of electricty, work and frustration of course.

ral-clan · Post by **ral-clan** » Fri Oct 27, 2006 8:12 am

I wasn't on this board when you originally had this problem, or I would have just suggested:

- You install UAE, and create a real or virtual Amiga partition on your PC.
- Connect the A1200 IDE hard drive to the PC IDE chain.
- Using UAE, read the contents of your A1200 hard drive, and dump it to the UAE partition.
- Remove the A1200 hard drive from the PC and connect the spare IDE hard drive you have.
- format it as an Amiga hard drive with UAE.
- dump the contents of your original A1200 hard drive from the UAE backup to the new IDE hard drive.
- install into the A1200.

I don't actually own an A1200 (I have an A2000 w/SCSI) so maybe I'm not seeing why you couldn't do this.

Also, I've never heard of an IDE interface which doesn't support a Master and Slave. Are you sure you couldn't just buy a new cable for you A1200 which would allow you to hook up two drive (with the Amiga's case off, of course - in order to fit it all) temporarily and dump the contents of the old drive to the new one?

Also, if your drive ever becomes dead or stuck again, there are two LAST-RESORT tricks I have heard of:

putting your drive into the freezer for a few hours will often temporarily revive a dead hard drive. You have to use it immediately and dump it right away, once you take it out of the freezer, while it is still cold.

If you have another drive of the EXACT same make and model, you can actually open the drive shell, remove the platters, and transplant them to the new drive. You have to do this under extremely clean circumstances, and do not use the new transplanted drive for more than immediate backup to a brand new drive.

gklinger · Post by **gklinger** » Fri Oct 27, 2006 11:17 am

This probably isn't the place for me to ask this as the site is oriented towards the VIC-20 but having never used E-UAE (the Mac OS X version of UAE) for anything more than games, I'm as curious as heck.

Are you guys saying that a hard disk attached to a PC running UAE can be formatted and software installed to it and then moved to an actual Amiga and it will work? If so, a friend of mine is going to be very happy as he has been looking for a relatively pain-free way to get get an Amiga 3000 up and running. This sounds like the perfect solution.

carlsson · Post by **carlsson** » Fri Oct 27, 2006 12:32 pm

ral-clan: The thing is that the Windows 98 version of UAE is not as capable as the Windows 2000/XP version (or E-UAE for Linux etc). I don't know about master or slave settings, if I have mentioned anything about it in this thread it probably was a typo.

I might be able to find a 2.5" cable with two connectors, but it seems extremely rare or expensive to find. I toyed with the idea to get three 3.5" to 2.5" adapters and a standard 3.5" cable, but it also seemed overkill. I've used my Amiga with the cover off for long periods of time, so it wouldn't be anything new.

Alas, I don't own two identical hard disks. To locate and buy an identical 60 MB Conner hard disk probably would've cost me more than $50...

Golan: The hard disk can not be partitioned on a foreign computer under Linux/OSX. You need to boot the Amiga from a floppy and run HDToolBox. While you're at it, you can format the partitions on the Amiga as well. Once you have the partitions ready, you should be able to mount them (at least in X86 Linux - don't know which file systems are available in OSX) and read/write files from either the prompt (minus the extra permission bits) or within emulation.

idrougge · Post by **idrougge** » Sat Oct 28, 2006 10:08 pm

If you use UAE's SCSI emulation, wouldn't it be possible to run HDToolbox in UAE to partition the hard drive?

carlsson · Post by **carlsson** » Sun Oct 29, 2006 4:32 am

I'm not sure how to enable it. I tried to attach physical disk slices: /dev/hdc1 and so on to E-UAE, but it wouldn't have anything of it. I had to mount them to the file system: mount -t affs /dev/hdc1 /mnt/p1 in order to read/write to the disk. Therefore I drew the conclusion that a disk that needs partitioning couldn't be setup only through emulation. I might be wrong though, anyone who is in need can try. Perhaps the Windows 2000 version is even more capable than the E-UAE backport.

In any case, you need a copy of HDToolBox. There are *ahem* HDF images of a complete Workbench 3.0 install out there, which is from where I extracted that one program file. As I wrote, there should come a special floppy with this software with Amigas using OS 2.1 or better, but my Amiga 1200 w/ OS 3.0 didn't have a such disk.. perhaps the hard drive was mounted by a third party before I bought it second hand.

idrougge · Post by **idrougge** » Mon Nov 06, 2006 4:22 pm

I think, that if it gives the emulated Amiga access to the SCSI or IDE interface, it should be configured to use not a slice, but a controller. This is just deduction, since I've only used SCSI emulation to access CD drive in WinUAE.