WinUAE question

[power]

So I bought a CD32 that has an 8GB CF, machine itself runs a TF330, what's the safest way to mount this in WinUAE so i can add/remove files??

All the guides are focused on setup not a pre-existing image.

[Heywood]

It is pretty straight forward - You may need to launch WinUAE as administrator to do it but you can mount the CF card as a HD pretty easily-  not in front of my machine at the moment but you should be able to clone the card to a hdf so you have a known good backup

[EDIT]Attached is a screenshot of WinUAE and a 4GB CF that used to be in my A600 but the concept is the same (and this is what I did with my CD32/TF330) - I used Add Hard Drive and selected the CF - You can see "Create Hard disk image file" to backup that CF just in case you bodge things but you can just "Add Hard drive"

Mount other directories or whatever and use Dopus to drag things over

I spent a lot of time in WinUAE working on the directory structure etc in a HDF before moving things over to the CF - one reason to consider using a HDF instead of just mounting a directory is that there are some (very few but still some) instances where Amiga Filenames don't fully translate to Windows resulting in some WHDLoad based software from not working.

[power]

yes i do want to back it up before playing with it. i'm used to VM's with Hyper-V but haven't used WinUAE it looks pretty simple though.

I was kind of hoping to just create a VM and have it boot from the CF. But the backup is important.

[Heywood]

Yeah the Emulator can boot directly from the flash card - so you can test and refine as much as possible on the PC and then when you're happy plug it into the machine proper for that final verification.

Backups are like umbrellas - its when you don't have it is when you need it

[quantum8]

If you want to back it up i'd recommend to use something like etcher, https://www.balena.io/etcher/ , to do a full image of the card.

That way if anything goes wrong you can just re-image the card back to exactly how you had it.

[power]

thanks I'll give that a go on the weekend. the image is what i want at this stage. previous owner of the machine did up a pretty decent install. don't wanna break it

[power]

So much for that, Windows just wants to format the volume.

[Heywood]

Windows wont know what to do with it - just cancel when it says to format the flash card

WinUAE should be able to read the card - I have a USB CF reader - not sure if its absolutely necessary but I find running WinUAE as admin should allow it to mount/read/write the CF - if it's already formatted you should hopefully see that WinUAE sees it as a RDB device.  If you haven't given up yet, walk us through your steps and maybe we can help you through it.

[power]

I decided to leave it be for now, might come back to it later.

the previous owner had a half decent setup going I just wanted to back it up.

[power]

got the CF up and booting based off what you said.

also used a -disableharddrivesafetycheck on the WinUAE shortcut as well and all is good!

Backed up my CD32 and A1200 installs nicely with WinImage now too.

I'm getting there

Also backed up the WHDLoad files just in case, might look into updating some slaves as well as these won't be the latest anymore afaik.

[intangybles]

Glad you got the Backup Happening!

I was lucky to be able in my case to just read my "SD" card volumes directly via USB from the ScSi2SD card.