Hard disks formatted with WinUAE... Useable by a real Amiga?

[Thomas]

You cannot format a drive which has a drive letter in WinUAE. You must use an unformatted, unpartitioned drive. Then you can use the "Add Harddrive" option in WinUAE, use HDToolbox or a similar program to partition it and format it using WinUAE. This drive then should be usable in your Amiga. Windows must not see the drive. Once Windows sees it, it is unusable in an Amiga. And there is a security protection in WinUAE which prevents Windows drives to be seen in WinUAE, so the drive has to be really empty (or Amiga formatted). However you can circumvent the protection by a command line switch, but this is for advanced users only.

Bye,
Thomas

[Thomas]

StevenJGore wrote:
But presumably the drive is still recognised by the PC's BIOS, and is shown on the BIOS start-up screen along with all other hard disks and DVD drives etc? How come Windows doesn't detect the drive?

Windows does not care about unpartitioned drives. In order to get a drive letter you have to run FDisk or a similar program.

So if I have a 2.5" hard drive that has previously been formatted on a PC, I can't format it with WinUAE at all? Any way round this?

You can run winuae.exe with the -disableharddrivesafetycheck option. But be warned: it will offer your Windows drive for addition in WinUAE either. If you access it with HDToolbox your Windows installation and all data will be lost.

Bye,
Thomas

[Thomas]

But I have been recently trying to burn these onto a CD using WinUAE and MakeCD or MasterISO.they both see the CDR drive but wont burn....I have a hard time comprehending MakeCD...also I did not make an Image..was just trying to dump files onto the CD.........I tried burning a CD of one of my partitions using Windows..........but when I use the CD in my CD32/SX32 pro.....the files are all messed up and names are cut off.........like .info is now .NFO...........gets me really upset.

Well, writing CD-R(W)s with MakeCD works flawlessly for me on WinXP. However you can always use MakeCD to create an image file. Call it something.iso, then load something.iso into Nero or a similar burning program and write it to CD.

If you want to create the image with Nero, choose ISO 9660 Level 2. Level 1 will cut off file names. You can also use Joliet if your Amiga has CacheCDFS or AsimCDFS installed.

Bye,
Thomas