Need wisdom from Amiga Gurus out there! Getting data off my A1200 2.5" HD to PC for preservation

Hi there everyone,

I was a hard core Amiga user from 1990-1998.. I have a working basic amiga 1200 with a working 2.5" 350mb IDE HD. I sunk countless hours into this fella. I created tons of music and other content. I recently got my music studio back up and running and this included getting my Amiga running Tiger Cub and other stuff.

Once upon a time I had an awesome program that let me read/write 3.5" floppy disks on the amiga which was a great way to move files back and forth, however many moons ago this stopped working.. i'm so rusty on my WB / CLI stuff (can't even remember how to get the CLI window open.. yea.. sad) that I have no idea what anything does anymore..

I'm also suspecting that either all of my floppies got nuked by something making them unreadable or (more likely) my floppy disk drive is on its last legs. I'm likely to eventually buy a new A1200 to put this hard drive in, but ultimately the biggest fear is losing the 2.5" hard drive due to age.

At one point a couple years ago, I bought one of those CF PCMCIA adapters thinking that might do the trick, but it seems that i couldn't get the device to be recognized and again.. being sooo rusty, i was likely to make things worse before they got better.

I have pulled out the 2.5" HD and connected it to my two laptops (macbook pro running windows 8 and macbook running windows xp, both via bootcamp). it seems like maybe there would be a way for WinUAE or some other emulator to see the physical hard drive over USB and boot from that somehow.. but the device doesn't show up since the window since i imagine the hosting OS would need to first know what the disk format is and understand it..

This would mean the world to me to figure out how i could migrate the files over in some effective way. I'm not very Amiga savvy so i'm really looking for the easiest way to get this done.

I would like to really just start over with the hard drive and reinstall WB and all that, but before i do anything that crazy and undo some of the hot-rodding i did back in the day which i'm pretty sure broke some stuff.. i would feel soooo much better if i knew the files themselves were backed up and safe.. not to mention if this 15+ year old hard drive decided to die.. it would be heartbreaking.

Sincerely,
Caleb

Hi and welcome. You can indeed use WinUAE to acfess the Amiga HDD. Connect out either to a spare IDE channel on your PCs motherboard IDE port if it has one, or use an external ide to USB HDD enclosure.

Boot the PC up and then run WinUAE. Go to the Harddrive section if the properties and select to add a HDD. Although Windows either didn't show the drive or asked to first it, WinUAE should show it correctly in its list of available HDDs. Select the drive and set anything needed such as logical name and device name, then set the emulated Amiga to roughly match the spec if your real A1200. Don't have any ADF's in the DF0: floppy drive entry, and start the emulator. Should boot right into the HDD.

Now an easy way to back the HDD up to your PC is to create a directory anywhere you like on the PC, then from WinUAE's Harddrive section add the directory as a Harddrive. Make sure it's named after the logical drives on the real HDD. So if your real drive is DH0: and DH1:, then you would give the partition DH2:. Now when you boot WinUAE using the real hdd, you week also get an extra hdd for the pc directory. You can now copy whatever you want from the real Amiga HDD into this directory, and because it's a pc directory you will then be able to access and use all the Amiga files from Windows. Meaning you could then back them up to cd-r, or copy them to a new HDD.

Hope that helps.