WinUAE hard files from a real Amiga HD

[nOw2]

I'm hoping someone can help here as I'm tearing my hair out trying to get this to work. I can't get a real Amiga's hard disk imaged reliably into WinUAE.

Here's the situation: I have an A4000D which needs to run all the time, but the hardware is now sadly getting rather unreliable.

I'd like to image this machine into VMWare, by way of WinUAE on XP. I originally tried E-UAE but I *need* uaenet.device (the SANA-II implementation) which is WinUAE only I believe.

I have created an image of the hard disk (using dd) and also images of each partition separately (using Amiga RDB support on Linux).

The hard disk is 40GB containing 5 partitions. The partitions are formatted as SFS (I have tried 1.84, 1.195 (which they are on the real machine) and 1.227).

  39G  fulldisk.rdb.hdf

 0.6G  hd0.hdf
 4.1G  hd1.hdf
 2.1G  hd2.hdf
  18G  hd3.hdf
  12G  hd4.hdf

I can successfully use the full hard disk image to mount the partitions smaller than 4GB - hd0, hd1, hd2. This is using the WinUAE RDB funtionality.
However any access to hd2 causes WinUAE to crash. HD3 and HD4 show as NDOS and attempts to access (e.g. using SFSCheck) cause odd problems and SFS warnings.

I do not know if this is due to large partitions or due to the partitions being beyond the 4GB hard disk barrier (does uaehf support large disks?).

Access to uaehf.device by hdtoolbox (both versions from 3.1 and 3.9) appears absolutely fine; identical to the real machine.


The other method I have tried is to mount each partition as a separate hard file.

If I do this, the partitions all show up as NDOS. However, if I do 'version hd0:' I get the correct SFS reply, and also 'SFSCheck hdX' finds no errors on any partition!

AmigaOS is the only thing which can't read them in this case.

My Googling is not finding much more help on this; everything in the WinUAE logs looks okay and matches mailing list postings by users who have working installs - though the examples are all from small hard disks, up to 2GB. I am able to create a new 10MB hard file from within WinUAE and format it as SFS without problems.


I do not want to use the host filesystem - I do have a working OS3.9 install like this (hence I am able to use HDToolBox from 3.9) but for reasons of performance and of needing to keep the UAE image near identical to the A4000, I'd like to use hard files.

Any help greatfully received! Thanks!

[nOw2]

The disk image and partition images are indeed from a real A4000. I used dd and Linux kernel RDB support to image the disk.

[nOw2]

Thomas wrote:

IMHO the 40GB full HDD file should work just fine when connected to the UAE controller.

Not so far - it looks as if I'm hitting a large disk problem, but I am able to see the hd2 partition which start at 4.5GB (if not able to do much with it).

If WinUAE crashes (winuae.exe), then go to eab.abime.net and ask Toni Wilen for support.

I think a crash when accessing hd2 is a red herring. hd3 and hd4 are not accessible at all.

I tried to format hd4, but on reboot it recorrupted and came back as NDOS. This is without writing any data to it after the format operation.

If AmigaOS crashes (red guru), you probably have some software installed which is incompatible with your "new Amiga". Either tweak the configuration until it matches your real Amiga or delete the incompatible software.

A copy of the system using the local file system (non-hard file) works and boots up as expected. I did have to remove ROM mappers and the like.

If you want to use single-partition HDFs, make sure that you enter the correct geometry (Surfaces, Sectors, Reserved, Block size).

I will double check this; I have used only the defaults and minor variations.

And do not swap different versions of SFS forth and back.

I am careful to begin each attempt from a pristine copy of the disk image(s).