Amiga 4000 with Workbench 3.0 installed on the original 120 MB IDE drive. I do not have the original 3.5 floppies (quite disappointing).

What is my best option to have this boot to a flash drive? (assuming I can).
Can I copy existing boot disk to a CF Card?

Thank you,

CC

@cc3d

Yes, that should be easy enough. If you have a CF-to-IDE adaptor you can just hook it up to the IDE cable as slave and set slave jumper. However, some lack a jumper and only work and master, in which case you would need to make the HDD as slave. That's the hardware.

The software. Hopefully your HDD install has HDToolbox in Tools. Some installs don't. The default device driver of scsi.device will pick up yout IDE drives. Likely it will detect a disk change for last disk, when you click on a disk, but be careful as setting a disk as last then changing disk layout can stop it booting. You will then need to install the CF drive to setup RDB. From there you can duplicate the existing setup of the partitions. Being careful to keep partitions below the 4GB mark. As it's OS 3.0 (and ROM 3.0) I think 4GB is the largest it can use.

Back on Workbench you may need a reboot. Then you can format the volumes. And begin the copy.

I don't know if the OS 3 ROM will have any problem with the CF card type. HDToolbox can be picky and refuse to work on a unit it doesn't like the type of.

You could also just use a modern computer to image the IDE drive direct to CF. But it will be limited to the same size so not practical. And on Amiga the RDB should match the brand and model of the disk. I'm not aware of any Amiga disk clone tools. That could clone a layout onto a new drive, including any size adjusting, and setting up a proper RDB to match.

Last edited by Hypex on 12-Jun-2020 at 05:56 PM.

@Hypex

Thank you. Much to think about. I have a CF/IDE interface coming. The machine has the HD Toolbox on it. I am realizing/remembering how far back the Amiga OS was for us. Amazing how much we got done on those machines. I also keep going for the middle mouse wheel.

Thanks, I'm gonna tool around with it.

How can I copy an image of the current Amiga drive (120 MB) for safe keeping? I have an IDE/USB interface but the Amiga drive won't show up through it. Behaves real strange. When I connect the IDE cable, it spins down. Rather, I learned this by disconnecting the IDE cable and the drive spins up.

I have confirmed the IDE/USB interface works with a 30GB drive circa 2006.

@cc3d

Yes after discovering the middle mouse wheel it is hard to go back to those basic two buttons. But those Mac people had to put up with crippled single button mice for years lol. You can of course buy usb mouse adapters and install mouse wheel drivers if you really want to drive the mouse behind the wheel.

What OS are you connecting the drive on? The drive should connect but nothing would appear on the desktop because it wouldn't understand it. However it should come up in disk tools as unformatted or similar.

I don't know what converter you have. I have a HDD dock the drives slot into to that connects via USB. But usually it connects direct to the adapter without needing a cable. However, there is the old IDE cable standard and the newer IDE cables supporting UDMA. If you have an old 40 pin cable that may cause issues. The drives were mounted in different spots. Best to avoid any cable if you can or use a modern 80 wire cable so can hook it up end to end. Plus it would need power. Externally or a twin USB cable getting power from two ports. An old drive may draw more power than a newer one.

I still find AmigaOS easier to use than Windows. On Amiga HDToolbox is easy to find, as well as the Mac or Linux equivalent. On Windows I always get lost because they hide it under all these layers. After ten versions it's as hard as ever to use a new drive in Windows.