advice moving files and partitions

[kamiga]

I've got a dataflyer 500 ide hooked up to my A500.

Originally, I used two hard drives with it, and am now looking to combine the contents of the drives onto a single 4GB compact flash drive.

I've got the flash drive formatted and booting.

The source files are just under 2gb.  I can store an imaged or compressed copy AND still have room for the actual files.....

I've used 'dd' within linux to image the drives, have "conv=swab"'d them, and have mounted them within WinUAE.  I've also imaged the empty 4gb flash drive, and have that mounted as well into WinUAE.

I need to copy multiple partitions from each drive onto the flash drive, but there's a few issues:

* The dataflyer disk partitioning tool during setup is a piece of crap.  The UI is horrible, and it doesn't appear that I can do precise sizing of the partitions. I was originally going to recreate partitions of the same size, and then use TSGUI to create rdf's, and then expand the rdf's over top of the duplicate-sized partitions.

* I'd simply copy the files, but there are errors on the disk which abort the copy.  I don't remember if there is a flag to ignore it, and otherwise not sure which utility can copy and ignore them.  I thought about using LHA (which I'm pretty sure can ignore errors), but there's gotta be other ways.

* I don't care about maintaining most of the partitions as partitions.... if they are simply directories now, that's fine by me.... except....

* I have at least two partitions that are NOT amiga dos formatted.  These have to be copied sector by sector.

After creating a "merged" 4gb drive, I intend on swab'ing it, and then dd'ing it back to the card.  This works exactly as it should, and I have no trouble with this....

This seems like a simple exercise.... If the file systems were easily supported by linux, if I could mount and unmount .rdf's, and so on, maybe I'd already be finished with the task......

Thanks for any advice
kamiga

[Matt_H]

For AmigaDOS partitions, there's really no need to do a dd-style sector-by-sector copy. I'd suggest just prepping the partitions on your CF card how you like and then copying the files using

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copy oldrive:#? newdrive: all clone or DOpus. And you could do everything under WinUAE using a better partitioning tool and a full Amiga environment and then just plug the CF card back into the Dataflyer when you're done with everything (the Dataflyer does support the RDB standard, right?).

For your non-AmigaDOS partitions, I recommend the dcp tool from this package. It's been a while since I used it, but it does essentially the same thing as dd but with Amiga-like syntax. Assuming your new partitions are an exact match to the old ones, everything should be fine. Might take a few tries to get it right - make sure to keep backups of everything until you know you've been successful. I'm guessing they're Mac or PC partitions for emulation?

EDIT: Oh, sorry, missed the part about there being errors on the disk that you need to ignore... Hmmm... Well, if you use DOpus you'll at least be able to continue from where the copy job halted, but I think you will have to manually intervene each time an error comes up... Hopefully someone else has a better idea...