Using PC's CD-ROM from A1200?

[Ren]

I have an Amiga 1200 (Kickstart 3.0) with a PCMCIA network adapter, which is hooked to a LAN via router.

The question is, is it possible to use the CD-ROM in the networked PC from the Amiga as if the CD-ROM had been physically connected to the Amiga (ie. you get an icon for the CD-ROM on the workbench)?

Also, is there a way to backup whole Amiga HD to PC via TCP/IP? I know I could stick the HD in the PC and using winUAE make an HD image, but this it too messy.

[lorddef]

Don't know about the CD-ROM thing, perhaps you could use samba.  

Backing up to the pc is easy though, just set up an ftp server on the pc and upload the entire amiga drive to it from an ftp client.

[blobrana]

I imagine that the cd would be seen .
As all the devices on the pc side...


I just made a folder on my wndows machine and copied by hand the os3.9 files to it (with winuae)..
so you could just network dump the files straight into the folder...(no messy disk image).

As for back ups you could fit a cd/dvd  writer directly to the A1200 (i just found out)...
http://kuddelone.gmxhome.de/dvdrtools/dvdrtools-e.html

http://www.amigau.com/c-amiga/CD.htm

[Ren]

Thanks for that. I was hoping there is a set of programs for PC and Amiga which let you use PCs drives from the Ami (I've seen such software for C=64 and 8bit Atari) but the solutions you guys gave me should be ok.

Just one more question.. What is the best Amiga command line FTP client? And could I just run the client from the HD or would I need to make a boot disk and run it from the floppy?

I'm sorry if this sounds like a silly question, but I'm new to Amiga (even that I had my first computer back in '84).

[Noster]

Hi,

if you have already a TCP/IP connection to your PC it should be quite easy:

Just allow the other computers access the drives (CD-Rom, HD) of your PC.
Load the Samba-handler from "http://www.dmbsoft.de" and follow the instructions of the documentation, or load "smbfs" from the Aminet "ftp://de.aminet.net/pub/aminet/comm/tcp/smbfs.lha"

Then you could mount the PC drives and use a simple filemanager like DirOpus "http://dopus.free.fr/download.html" to copy your whole HD to any available directory of your PC.

You need not to boot using a boot-disk for this purpose. You could add a new HD to an Amiga-system, start the Amiga, partition and format the other drive and copy the whole contents of your old HD to the new one, and then repartition your old HD while the system is still running !
Ok, there are a few things you should rely on or you loose your system, but I've made it several times, my Amiga installation is 12 years old ! In the meantime I've updated the OS two times and changed the HD two times (and have repartioned it several times more), I've made two processor upgrades, added an GFX-card and other hardware, changed from SCSI-I to UW-SCSI, but I've never needed to make a new clean installation !

You should nevertheless create a boot-disk (and usually an additional tool-disk) so you could copy your backup back to the Amiga, if its required one day. You will need an additional tool-disk, because all required tools will not fit on a single disk.

Noster