Closed My CF and HDD Setup Service is back!

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fitzsteve

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Hi All,

Since I now have some spare time; I am again offering my services setting up CF cards and IDE HDD's for Amiga systems, to comply with Amibay's rules you will need to own original copies of any OS and Software you want me to install, you can either send your original copies to me with your CF or HDD or you can photograph them with your user name written on paper with the current date.

The current services I can offer are:

Setting up a standard Workbench 2.x/3.1/3.9 or Classic Workbench versions (GAAE up to CWBOS3.9)
Setting up RTG Drivers (for PicassoIV for example) Basically anything Emulated in WinUAE I can do.

Note I no longer have any Mediator here so I can't help with Mediator setups anymore.

I can help by installing custom Libraries for 060 & PPC Cards, I can also setup ACATune if you have one of the ACA Cards.

Setting up PCMCIA drivers to use PCMCIA Card Readers.

Setting up large Disk support for HDD's over 4gb, partitioned to users requirements. (Your choice of FFS, SFS or PFS3)

I can do 2.5in & 3.5in real IDE HDDs, SSD's and CF cards but I do not have the facility to prepare SCSI drives, sorry. If you have a suitable converter I can do Sata and SSD and HDD too but you must be sure your adapters are compatible as I cannot test them on a real Amiga (only WinUAE)

I will also give advice on which setup is most suitable for your own Amiga as it will depends of the specs of your machine, feel free to post here or message me (y)

Cost of my services:

My Standard Workbench install including Classic Workbench Packs is £10 + any postage costs.

My advanced installs such as for RTG, custom library support is £15 + any postage costs.

I no longer hold CF Cards in stock, you are welcome to order them for delivery to my address or I can buy them on your behalf. Cost will depend on the current market prices, normally you can expect to pay around £7-£8 for 4gb (good quality media) and £10-£12 for 8gb. 16gb is possible too, I think you will pay £15-£18 in today's market.

I also offer a service where I can create a backup image of your CF card and supply on DVD which you can restore at any time using WinImage. You can do this yourself obviously, but if you would like me to do it his extra service is £5 (this covers my time and the media)

In many cases I can also offer a digital download service where I will prep an Image for you and deliver it electrically.

For this to work I will need the exact size of your CF card in bytes, as my image has to be equal or smaller than your media, I will also deliver the software (shareware version of WinImage) for you to use to load this onto your CF. Other Image writing software might work for you i.e if you are not on Windows but is untested by me.

You can see my guide here for creating your CF from my Image:

https://www.amibay.com/showthread.php?t=39231

I will upload it to my web space for you to download, a 4gb CF image is approx 2gb once compressed. Bare in mind your download limits when using this service.

As an alternative I can burn the image/s to DVD and mail them (at extra cost of course)

This is only available for 4gb and 8gb CF cards only, if your card is too small (i.e smaller then my smallest images) I cannot help sadly.

My electronic setup prices are the same as for real drives but of course you don't pay any postage and you receive your image quicker!

Please post in this thread if you want to take up my services, details and exact requirements can be discussed in PM :)

Thanks for reading & I hope I can help the community some more (y)

Steve.

Examples:

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Feedback from satisfied customers :)

https://www.amibay.com/showpost.php?p=385629&postcount=34

(+see attached)

View attachment 40959
 
First image is delivered to rootboy electronically (y)
 
Nice. My ftpmust be capped as I was only getting 1.1mb/sec uploads and my up speed is something like 18meg lol.
 
Two more images delivered to rootboy - I hope you like them :)

@Thread, I can now offer a bit more flexibility with the electronic service. I found that I was able to prepare images made by the other person just like a real drive, so if you have a specific size drive that you want to use as long as you have a Windows computer to use WinImage to make a .vhd image that you can zip and fpt to me I can install onto that image for you.

I was able to do 20gb and 32gb images for rootboy, a 32gb image compressed is only 30mb ish so not a massive file to transfer, note that once it's setup depending on what's installed the final image can be several gb.
 
Still chugg'in along! LOL!


Some lessons learned by the test dummy (me) in the process were:

Don't create a virtual disk (VHD) of the entire hard drive. For some reason the process makes it a bit too big once the image is loaded on it. Figure on reducing your VHD size (compared to the physical disk) by about 10%. Neither one of us can explain how this happened...

When you scope out the drive that you want to buy (should this be necessary), newer & bigger is just fine. An older drive that's closer to the original requirements of your Amiga is likely to be used, and likely to be more expensive than a newer, bigger drive. Nonetheless, you need to check with fitzsteve before buying any drive.

You want to select the "Fixed Disk" option in VirtualBox, and don't forget to drill down to the actual target (your disk). It's easy to forget to do this (if you do, you will end up with a VHD of a random spot on your hard drive. No problem, just have VirtualBox delete it for you).

Any CF card partitioned and formatted for FAT greater than 4 GB will only end up being 4 GB when VirtualBox gets through making a VHD of it. Even though someone somewhere managed to put more than 4 GB on it at some point it time, VirtualBox will not be able to do the same. Delete the partition and re-create it as NTFS and format it before having VirtualBox create the VHD of it for you.

Be sure to buy good quality CF cards, and be sure to either buy a spare, or that you will be able to come across the *exact* same CF in the future (buy a spare).

Downloading the completed image is a lot like getting all four of your wisdom teeth pulled at the same time. Consider using a second PC for this purpose.


Thanks fitzsteve! It was an adventure at times, but well worth it!
 
Thanks for sharing your experience rootboy :)

I'm sure if the end user is on a Windows machine and use WinImage their images will be the correct size, I'm willing to offer the money back on the first image if it doesn't work.

Having a spare CF card is a great idea, that way you can always restore your image to the new media at any time as a full backup. Your image is yours to keep and use again at any time, all I ask is that you don't re-sell my work.

Thanks all for looking and feel free to get in contact even if you just have some questions.
 
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OMG this makes my life so much easier!!
Recommended to all - Let fitzsteve do the hard work, so you can have fun :D

( please remember to leave feedback when you have the time Steven )
 
Thanks for sharing your experience rootboy :)

I'm sure if the end user is on a Windows machine and use WinImage their images will be the correct size, I'm willing to offer the money back on the first image if it doesn't work.

Having a spare CF card is a great idea, that way you can always restore your image to the new media at any time as a full backup. Your image is yours to keep and use again at any time, all I ask is that you don't re-sell my work.

Thanks all for looking and feel free to get in contact even if you just have some questions.

Maybe you can clear up a couple of Windows questions for me. Each time that I image a drive it becomes "invisible" to Windows. No problem, I just boot into Linux and re-create it as a NTFS partition (which is the only work that I do on the drive in Linux), re-boot into Windows and then re-image it again. It's not terribly tedious to go back and forth, but is there a way to get Windows to see the Amiga drive? (the most it's ever reported back is the drive with a red question mark by it, and usually not even that). And when it does see the drive, and I go to format it in Windows, it only offers up FAT as an option (and then limits the drive to 4 GB). I do have EaseUS (which works great), but not on this PC.

BTW, I've been having great fun exploring my new HD! What a great service!

And still being new here, I don't know if I am supposed to mention it here, but feedback was left as well!
 
The drive should still show up in Windows at system level, go to administrative tools and disk management and you'll see it in the list and you'll be able to reinitialise it.

I'd recommend against repeatedly imaging the CF card as it writes to every single block and I don't think it will do good things for the life of the card, best to try and limit the amount of writes.

CF media being reasonably cheap I keep multiple cards for different setups.

Thanks again for using my services.
 
Little bump.

If anyone is worried about 8gb Images, there no need I have a couple of different images now that I can work from setup with PFS3AIO so there's no other patching needed.

All you need is your own 8gb CF/SD card (or I can get one on your behalf at cost) it will work on all Amiga's, including those with only a 68000 CPU just in case you were wondering.

Thanks for looking.
 
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Hi!

I have one 8gb CF Card in stock, it's the generic type as pictured below.

Comes with your choice of adapter, single adapter which connects direct to IDE header or traditional adapter with 5cm cable.

Price is £22.99 including setup and UK postage. International postage is £2-£3 extra depending on country. (Shipping is not tracked, tracking is £1.15 extra in UK and £5 extra outside UK)

mexSIb31LHEF2fnImtYITmQ.jpg

Card is brand new but has already been setup and tested, just needs your personalised finishing touches which we can discuss on PM ;)

Note this card is also tested and proven to work with ACA500
 
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What a great service, with great prices, too!

If anyone is worried about writing full images to flash media, it is also possible to create images that are not larger than their actual content, write the (too small) image to the card, and afterwards correct the drive/rdb size with fixhddsize from aminet.
This way you'll keep the cards wear-levelling out of trouble.

(You need to add another partition though, as fixhddsize cannot resize partitions, just modify the total drive size)

Keep up the good work Steve!
 
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