Connecting a FFS HDD to PC without destroying partition information

[Karlos]

Under windows 2000, using NTFS as the main filesytem I had absolutely no problem adding my amiga HD. It doesn't show up under windows itself but can be mounted in WinUAE directly.

I did this a few times when backing up a bunch of my amiga stuff to CD on the winbox.

[Karlos]

Hmm.

Well, I took an existing Amiga HD and added it to a spare IDE channel on my PC.

I didn't do anything in windows2000 itself. Unsurprisingly the drive did not show up, except in the BIOS settings.

I then ran WinUAE and went to the hard disk configuration section, and clickedthe "add hard drive" button. This opened a small window where my amiga HD appeared in a drop down menu. There was also a checkbox to set wether or not to mount the drive as read only or read/write.

Note that the Winuae config file I already loaded used a hardfile for a clean OS boot and some tools.

I then started the emulation. I needed to hold both mouse keys to enter the amigaos early startup and select the actual hardfile to boot from (being as I dont think winuae would like to boot a Warpos enabled OS3.x installation that was on the real HD).

Once booted, all the partitions that were on the HD were visible as normnal.

That really is all I did.

[Karlos]

Is the HD actually already partitioned and formatted under AmigaOS?

Furthermore, does it work in a real amiga (assuming you have one to test it in)?

[Karlos]

pablotinch wrote:
is not is complete empty .
how do i partion  a hardrive with amiga format but in windows ?

Ah. In that case, I am not sure - I haven't even tried the HDToolbox in WinUAE to even attempt this.

If it is possible, it should be just the same as it is on an Amiga, by running HDToolbox.

One caveat I can see would be the need to make sure you don't specify the device tooltype for HDToolbox (thus making sure you have to select it manually when it runs). I suspect it probably doesn't get mounted via the usual "scsi.device" as it would on a real Amiga.

If you can get as far as choosing the thing in HD toolbox, then you need to partition the drive (I don't know how much you already know about this but there is plenty of information available on this) as normal.

[Karlos]

I don't think you can format it AmigaOS compatible from the windows side. At least as far as I know, that is.

Do you have a working OS install for WinUAE already on a hardfile or something? If so, try HDToolbox to see if it can find the drive. Again I'm not sure what .device it would be under.

If you don't have a working OS install for UAE, I can't suggest anything other than using a real amiga to sort out the drive.