Create your own VHD

[Kirschsuppe]

There are a lot of diskimages and hdd-images available, but how can I create my own? Can anyone explain the process of creating a *.vhd with multiple partitions to be used in MiSTer and copy data to it?

[RealLarry]

And there is a handy tool in the Hatari emulator (at least under Linux) called atari-hd-image, which creates a harddisk image based upon a local directory.

[remowilliams]

- GEMDOS based hard drive emulation seems to be a simple way to transfer data over from a PC, but is it supported in MiSTer

MiSTer does not support that.

In terms of setup, you can use the same methodology you use for preparing a Satandisk SD device. Except in this case instead of having a Satandisk with an SD card, you are simply creating a blank empty file and attaching it to the cores HD.

Instructions for Satandisk prep: http://joo.kie.sk/?page_id=306

A small blank HD image:

HD512.7z

(91.56 KiB) Downloaded 670 times

ICD utilities:

ICD Utils.zip

(557.69 KiB) Downloaded 537 times

For copying data to the image, the easiest way is to use an emulator (Steem/Hatari) and mount your image as the first hard drive, and then a second GEMDOS file based HD pointed at a local directory on your computer.

[Kirschsuppe]

Thank you both. I was successful with these steps
- create image file with dd
- boot either with AHDI or (old) HDDRIVER Disk
- format, partion, install driver
- reboot
- mount GEMDOS and copy files over

Later HDDRIVER Versions have a faster boottime. HDDRIVER is a commercial product but older versions are part of TOSEC. At a last step I replace that HDDRIVER with a newer Version from a well known 3GB VHD.

[Televicious]

Omg, this is driving me crazy. I made a .vhd since .hd images from MiST aren't supported on this platform and when I try to load the HDDriver.st image in MiSTer it is a corrupt image, even though the same image works perfectly in hatari and MiST. A lot of disks are not loading in the MiSTer Atari ST. So I try Hatari to setup the .vhd, the only way to mount the .vhd is to mount it in windows, but then you can't change drive letters in hatari on windows when selecting a directory to mount as a drive. with a mountable image file like .hd that wasn't an issue as you could just drop the .hd in the hatari folder. Is everyone just using linux?

[remowilliams]

As I said above, I mounted the .vhd inside the Steem emulator in windows to do the file transfers for the image I built. You can also setup Steem to mount a local directory on your PC as a second hard drive for easy transfer. The same can be done in linux with Hatari.

Also if you have an ST SD image for MiST, you should be able to use it with MiSTer. Just rename the .img to .vhd

[Televicious]

Thanks remowilliams, loved your film too. That's good news for the image rename I'll try that first. Though they are .hd files, not .img. Guess I'll have to setup Steem instead of hatari on here. Any info as to why the floppy disks don't read on MiSTer though? They read perfectly well on MiST.

[remowilliams]

Any info as to why the floppy disks don't read on MiSTer though? They read perfectly well on MiST.

Always good to meet someone else who appreciates Sinanju

The ST core should read .ST floppy images fine, it will not read .STX floppy images.

[Televicious]

These are .st images, they read perfectly on MiST version and Hatari, but MiSTer does not read them for some reason, could be a TOS version issue maybe. Got my old MiST hd images running great though, thanks again. Good thing too, a lot of the resources I used to install applications on those MiST images are disappearing from the internet.