Using real Amiga HD with WinUAE

[Ami_GFX]

I not only use real Amiga drives in Winuae, I have also used Winuae to format, prep and install the system and software on drives for my Amigas. I have used USB, Firewire and SCSI external cases. You need at least OS3.5 for the harddisk toolkit to work right. You also need a fairly recent version of Winuae. I recently took an old 3.2 gb laptop hard drive, put it in a USB case, started Winuae from a command window with the [disable saftey check] bypass switch so it would regognize the drive, partitioned it and formated it in OS 3.5,restarted winuae with the now RDB Amiga drive as the hard disk and 3.1 install adfs loaded int the virtual floppy drives, installed system 3.1,ejected the virtual floppies, rebooted to the Amiga drive with a fresh 3.1 install to check things out and then added a couple of Winaue hdf volumes to the hard drive list, rebooted again and copied a lot of software onto the hard drive from the virtual volumes and then installed it in my A4000D and booted it. It is a lot less tedious than swapping floppies. There is also a function in Winuae to directly image Amiga drives and this is fantastic for backing up Amiga drives and then you can use these images to set up a winuae emulation of your real Amiga.

[Ami_GFX]

Are you talking about the "disablesafety check command?

Yes that's it exactly. The thoughtful Winuae programmers didn't want you to casually wipe out your windows drives. Once this switch is enabled, all your windows hard drives will be recogognized by Winuae, Including every external box I have tried--scsi, usb, firewire external hard drive boxes and zip drives.

[Ami_GFX]

Yes, you must include the hyphen. This is a standard DOS command line way of including command line switches.

I was never able to get Winuae to see a USB drive no matter what I tried.

There might be issues with the particular USB controller/driver combination in your system. Or perhaps a BIOS issue. My experience is that if Windows recogninzes a drive on the system, Winuae will recognize it as well. If you put an Amiga formatted drive in a USB case and it is not recognized, I would check it with the Windows disk managment utility--Control Panel/Administrative Tools/Computer Management/Storage/Disk Management. It should be recognized as an unpartitioned disk. You can also try mounting a Windows USB disk and then starting Winuae with the disable saftey check switch and seeing if the drive is recognized. I only use PC laptops and installing an Amiga drive inside is not an option. I have had no problems connecting external Amiga drives to the built in USB and Firewire ports of my Compaq laptop and I use an Adaptec Slim SCSI PC card controller with an external SCSI drive box for Amiga SCSI drives.

[Ami_GFX]

It sounds like Windows doesn't recognize the 1.2GB drive at all. You can see if it is recognized on the hardware level in the device magager: Right click the My Computer icon either from the desktop or start menu depending on how your system is configured and select Properties. The third tab should say hardware and the the first option should be the device manager. Third from the top should be a list of hard drives on the system and the 1.2gb drive should be on the list. If it is not, the drive is not recognized on a basic hardware level. I would check the jumper setting on the drive and change it to slave or CS(cable select) and see if these jumper settings make any difference. If the physical drive is on the list, then it is a software issue and I would check the Windows disk managment utility and if it is listed there as an unpartitioned drive, then it might be an issue with the Winuae version you are using and I would try downloading a newer version.

[Ami_GFX]

I would try a different case. Some times there are hardware incompatibilities between the IDE to USB interface in the external case and the USB controller on your computer. It could also be a driver issue. I would check to see if there are updated drivers for you computer. You should check the computer makers website. You might find newer USB drivers. And sometimes Windows will install a Microsoft generic driver for the hardware when there are better drivers available for download from the manufacturer.

In any case, it looks like a Windows problem and not a Winuae or Amiga problem.