Making copy of CF drive for 1200

[blackhula]

I've finally got all the pieces of my 1200 in one place! Actually I've got a pair of them, and I'd like them both to boot from compact flash. I have one bootable CF card that someone made for me, and I'd like to clone it. It'sbeen years since I've done much with my Amiga (had mine since 1989), but this has been fun... though I'd love to get back to actually reassembling and using the thing soon!

Here's what I've done. I've got Amiga Forever and WinUAE installed on my PC. I figured out how to get the "hardfile" from my bootable CF card to copy onto the PC harddrive. Now I need to get those files installed on a blank CF card. Do I format the CF card somehow? If so I can't figure how.

Also, how do I get the hardfile onto the "fresh" CF card? I installed AmiKit thinking that I could format and copy it through there, but so far haven't been successful.

I feel like I'm missing some tiny crucial step. I don't have Linux or a Mac, so I have to make this happen on the PC side somehow. Any ideas?

Thanks for any help. An evening of looking through my old ImageFX work and playing some games awaits me when this is all done. Thanks so much!

[Thomas]

Boot the 3.X configuration of Amiga Forever, then press F12, go to Hard Drives and use the "Add Harddrive" button to add the new CF card to WinUAE, click Reset. Now you can use http://thomas-rapp.homepage.t-online.de/downloads/tsgui.lha to write the image copy to the CF card. In order to select the unpartitioned drive, you need to choose "select raw device" from the menu. The new CF card must be as big as the HDF file or bigger. If it's bigger, the additional space cannot be used.

Before you can do this, you might need to clean the new CF card if it's already formatted for Windows. You can try with Windows Disk Management (right-click on My Computer, and select Manage, then select Disk Management) to remove all partitions, but better is the DiskPart command line tool with its sub command CLEAN.

If the Add Harddrive button is greyed out, you need to run WinUAE as administrator. Find winuae.exe, right-click it and select "Run as Administrator".

[blackhula]

Wow... I've got some of the basics of what you're saying here. I haven't been successful in clearing out the CF card, not even with the command line. I can't seem to get the command right to look at the proper drive to do a diskpart clean.

I also looked at your TSgui tool... looks cool. ONce I've got the CF card working (by some miracle) which .device will it be looking for?

I"m a little foggy on some of these Amiga basics... but I feel like I'm starting to get it a bit more. Thanks for all the help! Once this is done once, I can merrily plug away at my 1200... with my thanks to all of you!

[blackhula]

Okay, I just edged a little closer. The main problem (I think) is stripping the Windows formatting off of the CF card. That part I still don't have figured out. I think that I"m close on figuring out what I need to do with your tsgui program. Sorry to be such a bother... but do you happen to know of a resource where I can more of a step-by-step of how to clear off that CF card? I tried searching, but no luck.

Thanks for all of your help!