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Offline Semt-xTopic starter

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Amiga HD Image, File recovery
« on: August 02, 2007, 02:49:31 PM »
Hello!

After 11 years I still had this 540MB Seagate Harddisk laying about which used to be my Amiga 1200 HD. It got borked when i tried it to mount in linux about 10 years ago.
I connected it to my pc, turned it on, the hd started to spin as it should. An hd imagetool on my Windows PC was able to make a bit-copy image of it.
Now i'd like to recover files from this image. problem is i cant find a way to do it.

Does anyone have a suggestion how to do this?

Would be nice to have my .mod files back after all those years :]

thanks in advance!
Sem
 

Offline Matt_H

Re: Amiga HD Image, File recovery
« Reply #1 on: August 02, 2007, 05:50:13 PM »
So, what happened? You tried to mount the drive under Linux and it got screwed up? Or, did you try to put Linux on it and it got screwed up?

Either way, I think WinUAE is your only option for recovery now. First, make a backup of your backup image. Get a working UAE environment and then add the backup image as another HDD. ›

In the former case, it sounds like your RDB may have been trashed (if you remember, the RDB is what stores your patition layout). If that's so, then pretty much all of your data should still be there, the drive's just lost the map to it. Check Aminet for an RDB recovery tool - I've heard RDBSalv praised on several occasions.

In the latter case, you may be in more serious trouble, as some of your data may have actually been overwritten. RDBSalv might still work, but I'm not really sure.
 

Offline Semt-xTopic starter

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Re: Amiga HD Image, File recovery
« Reply #2 on: August 02, 2007, 10:33:12 PM »
thanks for your answer!

What happend I put the amiga HD physicly in an installed linux box and then tried to mount it. which messed up the filesystem. Never touched it since.
Until a few months ago, for the sake of backup i decided to give it a go in a Pc and see if it still physicly worked ( which it did).

Thanks for your advise, here is what i did;
I fired up WinUAE and spend an evening on trying to remember how things worked :]
After a few hours, I had rdb-salv (unregistered) running.
And found in the "salvage" tab, when selected a uaehf.device that it found DH0! and at the bottom of the info window on DH0 it says, "Data found on volume"
promising!
Another hour later i found the program HDtoolbox (workbench installer disk). But it didnt see any HDs (or partitions?)
allthough on my workbench i have 2 icons "SDH0:<4crap characters>" and "SDH1:"
Then i played around with settings in winuae to mount the HDimage, but nothing changed (other then an unclickable icon on the desktop)

this first evening excercise brought me a lot closer to restoring this very old data :]

any suggestions to get hdtoolbox to recognise the hd?

thanks in advance again :]
Sem
 

Offline Colani1200

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Re: Amiga HD Image, File recovery
« Reply #3 on: August 02, 2007, 10:53:20 PM »
Quote


any suggestions to get hdtoolbox to recognise the hd?



Did you start hdtoolbox from CLI with the correct device (like "hdtoolbox uaehf.device")?
 

Offline Semt-xTopic starter

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Re: Amiga HD Image, File recovery
« Reply #4 on: August 02, 2007, 11:21:34 PM »
i didnt!
When i tried it it DID show the partition whoooohoooo ! :-D

since im about to go to bed, i dont have time to google like earlier.
should i enter the partition settings and save them. to see if it does fix the problem?

UPDATE
Since its a copy of an harddisk image i gave it a go, and it didnt fix the problem :]

The harddisk image is a bitcopy image that i renamed to a .hdf extension, just to be able to load it in WinUAE.
I'll try a diff extention tomorow.

Sem
 

Offline mrad

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Re: Amiga HD Image, File recovery
« Reply #5 on: August 03, 2007, 04:24:31 AM »
I have gone partway down this road myself.  The idea was to mount a HD image with the loop option, which I have done with .iso CD images and NTFS partition images created with the dd command.  I haven't had success yet, but this is what I have discovered so far...

1) Linux-based partition tools don't know Amiga-style Rigid Disk Blocks.  When cfdisk, for example, looks for the partition table, that's where the RDB is and cfdisk concludes that the disk is unformatted.  Win95 allegedly will, without prompting, attempt to repair the (nonexistent) partition table and trash the RDB, but there are tools to fix that.

2) The AFFS kernel modules, which permit reading Amiga disks, are not compiled by default.  You have to compile your own kernel with "experimental file systems" or some such option turned on.  The AFFS source code won't compile separately as a module; the makefile seems to rely on parameters passed to it when a whole kernel is compiled.

3) AFFS, according to its documentation, cannot mount Old File System as an image.  The 488-byte blocks confuse the loop device, but FFS is ok.

So to do it this way, you would have to recompile a kernel with AFFS, mount the disk image with the loop option (if you don't need any OFS partitions) or copy the image to a left over hard drive (dd if=diskimage.img of=/dev/hdb , or /dev/hdd or whatever it is), and then mount it with the "-t affs" option.  As for myself, I got as far as realizing I have to compile a kernel; I have compiled kernel *modules* but never a whole *kernel*.
 

Offline Thomas

Re: Amiga HD Image, File recovery
« Reply #6 on: August 03, 2007, 07:25:26 AM »
Quote
on my workbench i have 2 icons "SDH0:<4crap characters>" and "SDH1:"


This means that your RDB is still there. So RDB-Salv is the wrong program. Now DiskSalv is what you need.

Bye,
Thomas

Offline Semt-xTopic starter

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Re: Amiga HD Image, File recovery
« Reply #7 on: August 08, 2007, 09:22:12 AM »
thanks! i only had the time to look at it briefly so far. Disksalv indeed recognises files \o/( i wasnt able to actually restore them because i didnt have an empty HD file available
Its the next thing to do :) ). Disksalv sees files but no directory structure.

Meanwhile i got a more precise picture on what was wrong with this disk. the RDB contains wrong partition information. I vaguely remember i only had 1 partition on the disk. and on my desktop (and in rdb salv it shows two. (both equal in size).


@mrad
Thanks for your answer but i dont plan to give linux another go. i ditched my linux box about 10 years ago and still dont see a reason to start using it again.
 

Offline mrad

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Re: Amiga HD Image, File recovery
« Reply #8 on: August 08, 2007, 07:58:08 PM »
> An hd imagetool on my Windows PC was able to
> make a bit-copy image of it.

That implies that you hooked that disk to a PC and booted Windows.  That may have been what trashed your RDB.  Maybe Win2k/XP don't do this (I'm not about to hook up my HD to find out...), see

http://www.mjmwired.net/kernel/Documentation/filesystems/affs.txt

That page gives instructions on how to repair the bytes.  Of course, those instructions use Linux commands and you say you don't use Linux, so you would have to burn & boot a Knoppix CD or install Cygwin on Windows to get a working dd command.  I suppose a hex editor on a sufficiently modern Windows machine might be able to load the whole flippin' hard drive image.  Then you would just type in zeros at offsets 0x00dc, 0x00de, and 0x00df (and perhaps 0x00e0--the instructions are ambiguous).
 

Offline Thomas

Re: Amiga HD Image, File recovery
« Reply #9 on: August 08, 2007, 09:31:08 PM »

Win98 and its relatives do this. WinNT/2K/XP/Vista don't. And WinUAE repairs it automatically, no need for manual actions. WinUAE can also create an image file of the disk.

Bye,
Thomas