Easy way to move AmigaOS from a SD card to a file for UAE?
I am using a SD2IDE in my A1200, and I use the SD card on my PC with UAE; when I want to do something that would take too long on the Amiga itself. This works but I already corrupted the SD card twice, and I am glad I have backups of those.
Is there an easy way to convert those SD cards in hard disk files so I can use it on UAE when needed? In this way I can just dump my updated SD card on the HD file and save the hassle to corrupt the SD card?
To be clear, I want an exact copy of the SD card, not just copy the folders for the data that is on the Amiga... If I need to just move data I can use a PCMCIA card adapter; but I need to run the same exact OS on that SD card in the emulator
Posted Nov 4, 2022, 1:35 AM UTC
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To take a backup of the exact data on an SDcard you need to take a bit copy of the card. Assuming we're talking about windows, something like Win32DiskImager should do it. That should leave you with file which is a bit-by-bit image of the SDcard.
From there I'm not sure how you'd mount this in windows. Probably you would need to mount the SDcard image as an SDCard and then within winUAE you could treat the image as an amiga HDF. Should be achievable but I've never tried to do it.
This second bit I don't do. I have a bit copy of my amiga CF card as a backup but I never use it in winUAE. I usually just use the CD card directly to make changes in winUAE before I move it back to my amiga.
Yeah, the issue was not much how to make an image of the card (have been doing that for ages with the various IOT devices and Raspberry pi); but more about how do you make it in a format that Windows can read via UAE.
The interesting thing about UAE is that it can read RDB format, which is what Amiga uses for its file format on a drive; that's how it is able to read directly an Amiga drive (or CF card or SD card); but I am totally clueless about how that translate into a HDF file.
I could try to make a HDF, make the 2 partitions as I have on my SD card and copy via Dopus the files on each partition. Not sure if that would work but it seems to be the only way I see to run my WB version from that card on UAE at this point :(
If you make an image of the drive, you can just mount the image as a hard drive in winuae, just use the add hardfile option and you can mount the image of the sd card in winuae.
So WinUAE can read img files as hard files? I thought they need to be HDF, while img file format is raw data serialized
A bit level copy of an sdcard is neither an rdb nor hdf, it's an image if the sd card's data layout. You need to mount it first before you can access the file system.
Maybe something like this, https://www.osforensics.com/tools/mount-disk-images.html, will let you assign the file a drive letter and then you can use it in winUAE