Tutorial:- Fast backup and restore (cloning) of Amiga CF's =D

[mamejay]

Hey Steve. I am trying to make a backup of my CF card. I have it connected to my PC and it works in WinUAE but in Winimage it is not appearing in the list of disk when trying to make a virtual disk.
What am I doing wrong?

 

[fitzsteve]

You need to run as Administrator, and also sometimes you need to unplug and replug the CF reader after running the program. Or just wait about 20 seconds and then try again to select the CF card sometimes it takes some time to show up.

 

[mamejay]

You need to run as Administrator, and also sometimes you need to unplug and replug the CF reader after running the program. Or just wait about 20 seconds and then try again to select the CF card sometimes it takes some time to show up.

Perfect!! That worked a treat. Now to back up my 3 amigas.

 

[swisstoni]

Is it possible to create a hdf file from a compact flash card for use in an emulator like UAE4all?

 

[fitzsteve]

Is it possible to create a hdf file from a compact flash card for use in an emulator like UAE4all?

Yes the HDF files should work with all emulators that are compatible with Virtual Hard Disk files

 

[-Acid-]

I found that even a brand new CF card without any Amiga RDB was able to have the image written to it and works like a charm.

I have the opposite when the image is written back to a card there is no RDB on it, WinUAE says UNK when it did have an RDB on it before I restored the image to it. Disk management in Windows has it down as not allocated and needs initialising. I followed your instructions (not that you can deviate from them really in the unregistered version) so I don't know what could be up. The VHD image of the card works fine in WinUAE so the image and it's data is okay.

I bought a bunch of CF cards at the same time they are all the same card from the same manufacturer and they work with Amiga's. The image was made from one of those cards and i've tried to write it back to one of those cards.

Now on one of the card I get an I/O device error when trying to initialise it in Windows, disk part also gives the same error.

On another card I tried the Amiga no longer recognises it to boot from but can be seen in HDTB (but it detects incorrect geometry now). WinUAE can read it and says it has an RDB. Now I just had a Windows requestor telling me I should backup this disk immediately and contact the hardware supplier... something has gone seriously wrong with these cards in using this util it seems.

Any ideas?

 

[-Acid-]

I managed to get one of them to write a MBR back the card after reinserting it, then used disk part and put it back in my A1200 and the geometry reads correctly again. The other still has the I/O problem so maybe it's a faulty card. Either way, WinImage doesn't seem suitable for all CF cards.

 

[-Acid-]

So the card that had the IO error I think has serious problems. When I put it into an Amiga it reads it and gets the geometry correct but when I try to save the changes in HDTB it says Error -3... any ideas what this means?