How to get an HDF made from a physical A3000 to boot in Minimig?

[8bitAndy]

Hi, I'm having fun getting my old A3000 to run on new hardware. A few months ago I was able to image the hard drives to HDF and create an "Amiga Forever" image that runs on my Windows PC. The Amiga Forever version looks just like my A3000 did in 1993.

Now I'm trying to move the HDF to the MiSTer. I have it set with IDE A600/A1200 ON, Fast-IDE ON, Chipset is ECS and ROM is amiga-os-205-a600.rom from my Amiga Forever.

The HDF that works in Amiga Forever won't mount in Minimig, but I was able to create a new HDF in Amiga Forever, partition it the same way, mark the boot partition as "bootable" and copy the files from the original HDF partitions over to the new HDF's partitions. I am able to mount the new HDF as a secondary device in Minimig when booting from a stock Workbench2.1 HDF, and I see all my old files including startup-sequence, etc.
When I try to boot with the new HDF as the Primary Master, I get a series of flashing grey screens and then it Gurus.

My Amiga skills are beyond rusty at this point. I copied the files in Workbench by "show all files", "select contents" and dragging the files to the destination. The partition is marked as bootable. Everything looks like it is there. What could I be missing?

Thanks for any help you can give.

[kathleen]

@8bitAndy,
Can you maybe share your .HDF (without your personal files) ? I think it would help to better understand where the problem comes from.

[Stinky]

Something to note there are some a600 roms which don't support HDD.

[kathleen]

You're right @Stinky, but It seems that the KS 2.05 has been used by @8bitAndy, with this KS, the HDD should work
(kickstart 2.05 has added support for IDE harddrives and PCMCIA cards)

[Caldor]

Might the A3000 have been using SCSI instead of IDE? Pretty sure that might affect how the original disk was used. How did you make the HDF? Did you copy the files from the original disk or was there a way to make into into HDF that retained all the boot sectors, filesystem and everything?

I might be easier to get to work to copy the files directly to a new disk made for the MiSTer setup with a filesystem you have gotten to boot and such.

Getting the original kickstart from the A3000 might also not help much if it was using a SCSI controller and the MiSTer is then using an IDE controller. I am pretty sure they work differently even though the device is called scsi.device for IDE. But I am not that experienced with these. I just know it can give problems.

[8bitAndy]

@8bitAndy,
Can you maybe share your .HDF (without your personal files) ? I think it would help to better understand where the problem comes from.

Thanks for the offer, but I can't share it.

[8bitAndy]

Might the A3000 have been using SCSI instead of IDE? Pretty sure that might affect how the original disk was used. How did you make the HDF? Did you copy the files from the original disk or was there a way to make into into HDF that retained all the boot sectors, filesystem and everything?

I might be easier to get to work to copy the files directly to a new disk made for the MiSTer setup with a filesystem you have gotten to boot and such.

Getting the original kickstart from the A3000 might also not help much if it was using a SCSI controller and the MiSTer is then using an IDE controller. I am pretty sure they work differently even though the device is called scsi.device for IDE. But I am not that experienced with these. I just know it can give problems.

Yes, the A3000 was SCSI. I have a feeling that the problem is related to this. I don't understand why it is perfectly mountable as non-boot but completely GURUs as a boot disk. Maybe the working Workbench2.1 HDF has a driver that allows it to read my HDF, and when I boot from my HDF that driver is missing?

I'm going to try creating a new disk using dd on Mister and partitioning it the way I'd like, then copying the working Workbench2.1 HDF files to it, and see if that boots. If so, I'll mount my original HDF as a second drive and try copying the files over.

[Caldor]

One thing you could try is Total Commander and its Amiga plugin, that can make it possible to access HDF files like ZIP files. Although it does not work with all HDF files, so might not work for yours.
AmigaDX 3.6
https://www.ghisler.com/plugins.htm

[Malor]

I don't even have my Mister booting yet (don't have all the hardware), but treating it like a normal Amiga, you can probably work around the problem. Since you can mount the A3000 image, you could create a native HDF with the Mister tools, and then just copy the files across. If you do it from the CLI, you'd end up with no effective difference. This would take awhile, and would be a little less satisfying than just booting the "old hard drive" on the "new machine", but it should work.

I moved away from the Amiga relatively early, but I remember hard drives as being really weird and hard to deal with. Every manufacturer seemed to have their own partition layout and software. The guesses upthread that it's IDE v. SCSI seem likely. Early IDE has some weird limitations on cylinder/head/sector settings that your SCSI image might be violating in some way, or perhaps Amigas have an equivalent to the boot sector on a PC. I had an A2000 with a hard drive, but only ever owned that specific one myself, so I just used the basic tools and never actually understood how it worked.

There could also be some underlying problem with the emulator, so if you can create a failing image that doesn't have any personal data on it, bringing it to the attention of the devs could be useful. By necessity, they'll understand more about how Amiga partitions and filesystems are laid out on the metal than most of us laypeople.

[8bitAndy]

I don't even have my Mister booting yet (don't have all the hardware), but treating it like a normal Amiga, you can probably work around the problem. Since you can mount the A3000 image, you could create a native HDF with the Mister tools, and then just copy the files across. If you do it from the CLI, you'd end up with no effective difference. This would take awhile, and would be a little less satisfying than just booting the "old hard drive" on the "new machine", but it should work.

I ended up taking this approach. It was a good chance to relearn how the Amiga works. I started with a stock bootable volume and my original volume mounted as non-bootable, then compared it to the Amiga Forever version and moved over the files needed to get it working the same way. There was a lot of cruft from old installs on my A3000 (EMPLANT drivers!) so maybe some of that was causing the Gurus before.

Copying using

Code: Select all

copy source:#? destination: all clone quiet

allowed me to keep the old datestamps on the files, which was satisfying.