Cloning Amiga Hard Drives.

I have the following:
Desktop project Amiga OS installed in to a 1GB CF Card (desktop Amiga)

Tower project: Amiga OS installed to a 3GB ye olde spinning hard drive.

1 "Amigakit 4GB CF Hard drive"

1 "Amigakit 4GB CF card for easyadf transfers."


I would like to have:

Desktop project: Contents of 1GB CF card cloned to the Amigakit 4GB CF from the easyadf kit such that I would have more free space and all the contents of the 1GB card on the 4GB card.

Tower project: Contents of the 3GB ye olde drive cloned to the 1 Amigakit 4GB CF Hard drive

Then I would have the 3GB ye olde drive as a backup and I would have the 1GB CF card for transferring data with pcmcia card if need be.

Now, the first problem is that windows does not recognize the file system of the 1GB card so it´s not like I can just copy and paste files around there.

- I suppose some kind of cloning software for pc could do the trick. I am considering acronis true image software.

or

- I would be interested with regards to instructions on if I can do this for free with winuae somehow...

or

- if this can be done using the Amiga itself, like transferring everything from the internal CF card/ye olde hard drive to the card in the pcmcia CF slot such that I would then just have to swap the places of the cards to get everything on the bigger card. (I´d need to know the exact commands needed to do this or what if any Amiga software could be helpful here.) What I am unsure of is if there are things like hidden files, boot sectors and such that cannot be simply dragged and dropped from one drive to the other. (for all I know those things may or may not be relevant to Amiga, I´m total idiot and a noob when it comes to Amigaos/workbench but trying to learn here!)

Also, the easyadf CF card apparently has different filesystem from the 1GB card because the easyadf CF card is ...easily... readable by pc. But maybe this will make it incompatible as an internal hard drive so I would have to destroy partition and repartition with another filesystem and all that...

Where should I start? :help:

use winuae mate,

mount your hard drive within winuae and copy to your hearts content

Problem with the ye olde drive is that my pc only seems to have s-ata slots and no ide whatsoever

So I guess some sort of Amiga software is going to have to be used. Is it even possible to clone everything from ide hard drive to pcmcia cf card with any Amiga software?

I´ll try winuae again later to see if I missed something obvious but so far I had no luck writing hdf file into a cf card either

Buy a USB to IDE lead. IDE44 is even powered direct from the lead. About 2 quid on ebay

Had no idea such things existed

Bought one from a finnish auction site similar to ebay for 2 euros

You can 'clone' CF cards that have (excactly) the same size with PD Image Creator.
Guess many programs can do this, but this one is tiny, free and doesn't care about file systems..

You could use this to quickly make an image of your 1GB card, then mount the image in WinUAE and copy the files to the 4GB card.
Should be quicker than copying the files manually back and forth.

It's also a nice tool for making CF backups in general.

Edit:
Writing back an image to a CF card is messing with the wear levelling of the CF card, so I guess you shouldn't do it. Thanks Robinsonb5.
But for creating images it's still nice. (Or use TSGui on the amiga)

I would strongly recommend that you *don't* do a block-by-block write of a flash device, especially if you're using a filesystem and/or device that doesn't support "TRIM". The wear-levelling used by flash drives makes certain assumptions about the access pattern. Writing to the entire device block-by-block violates those assumptions and leaves only a tiny fraction of the blocks on the device available for rotation by the wear-levelling algorithm.

Thanks robinson, that's good to know.
I need to learn more about wear leveling, and its limitations when used on amiga.
I'll make another thread for it later today.

I have all my Amiga files on a windows laptop , run UAE , pop the USB IDE hard drive / cf in and drag and drop ..

System
Work
Data

That's how my drives are usually setup.