Copying contents of Hard drive

[som99]

There are a few easy ways to do this

Put the Amiga drive in a Windows computer, run WinUAE and configure to your liking then just go to the "CD & Hard drives" option, press "Add Hard Drive" (don't forget to run WinUAE as admin) and then just press "create hard disk image file" and you have a clone of your drive safe and sound

Later if you go for a new HDD or a CF solution you just have to mount both the HDF file and the new drive and then prepare the new drive it in hdtoolbox, don't forget to edit tooltypes to uaehf.device and don't forget to set maxtransfer to 0x1FE00 after that just copy everything over to the new drive and you are done.

Good luck

Edit: someone posted while I was typing

[som99]

Thank for your responses, I'm getting a bit paranoid about doing this as there seems to be so many opinions about 'how to'. One thing has come to mind with a CF solution, does the original Os write back to the drive for caching etc? Just thinking about the limited number of write a CF might have. Has anyone tried an ssd solutiion? Apologies if the questions appear very noob :-D

I have a MLC PATA/IDE SSD/DOM in my A1200 and I like it and I have a few MLC PATA/IDE 2,5" SSD's in other retro machines that works great, over the years using CF cards in a lot of things only 2 of maybe 50ish cards has failed for me and I don't even think it was because of wearing them out, modern CF cards using NAND are rated over a million writes per block so that's not bad at all So I don't think you have to worry about wearing them out.

[som99]

Forgot to add if you are afraid of the drive dying you should do a entire clone of the drive as soon as possible with something like CloneZilla since every second you use it is a risk for it failing.

I don't know the size of drive and how much you got on it but also worth keeping in mind if not cloning it first is that the WinUAE route is a lot faster then via PCMCIA, so personally I would do it that way instead of PCMCIA if copying from a dying drive, since time = risk.

[som99]

Does CloneZilla clone an Amiga drive? Does it need to be on the IDE bus or can you use an USB adapter?

If unknown file system is used CloneZilla does a Sector to sector copy so yepp works for Amiga But if you don't want to make such a extensive backup of a drive HDF should be enough

Ive used USB adapters with CloneZilla without problems