Hi,

The 250MB IDE harddisk that is built into my msx is very old and I expect it to die soon.
What I would like to do is create a virtual image from the hdd that I can use with BlueMSX on my pc.

Any ideas on how I can do this?

Transfer everything using floppy disks will take forever (and my pc does not have fdd) so I'm hoping for a better solution.
In theory I could connect the hdd to my pc but I'm sure that Vista will kill it in an instant.
It is no problem if I need to buy some hardware.

Any ideas?


Kind regards,
Arjan Steenbergen

Maybe you could use Knoppix to back everything up to your PC? Should be worth a shot, since all you'll need is a single CD-R(W). Just make sure it boots from the Knoppix CD and runs okay before you hook up your MSX hdd. By default Knoppix mounts any hard drive as read-only (so no risk of it killing your MSX drive), plus it should be able to read your FAT12/FAT16 MSX partitions as well. You may need to create an additional FAT32 partition on your PC though, as Knoppix doesn't write to NTFS partitions by default. (I think there's a driver, but I'm not sure it's bundled). Anyhoo, you might give that a try...

That is a very interesting idea...
Have you tried this before?

found a friend with a CF IDE and tranfer your HDD on it
transfer this CF on a PC and make a CD ISO 8+3
is a long but sure Way and no connect HDD on the PC limited risk

Buy the NoWind USB device and copy everything to your PC through this device!
At least, that's what I'm planning to do to backup my 1GB SCSI disk.

Quote:

That is a very interesting idea... Have you tried this before?

No, not with an MSX hdd, but it should be no different from a PC hdd. And that's assuming there's such a thing as an 'MSX hdd' to begin with, which there isn't since it's the exact same file system, just without long file names (in case of windoze). Anyhoo, it should work like a charm and shouldn't do any harm as Knoppix will mount the drive as read-only. Just make sure you don't boot Windows by mistake, since I'm sure Windows would be able to find something it thinks it needs to 'fix'. Just give it a go, g00gle on Knoppix, burn the CD and see if it'll boot on your PC. Knoppix should boot without any issues on most PC's, and has pretty impressive hardware support. If you find Knoppix boots okay try connecting your MSX hdd and boot again. That should enable you to copy all your files to your PC or use something like partimage to create an image. If you have another 'empty' hd of at least the same size you could also use the dd command to create a backup of the original drive. I've never tried that though, but I've seen it as a suggested option for data recovery. SystemRescueCd could also be an option, but I've never used that one, might be worth looking into tho...

If you use linux, you can just dd the device to create an image of the whole hd. I have done this to backup old small hd's, as well as my 52MB SCSI disk I used with my Bert interface (actually done that many many years ago).

It should be something like:

dd if=/dev/hdc of=myimage.dsk

Sonic: are you sure the partition table format is the same??

Quote:

What I would like to do is create a virtual image from the hdd that I can use with BlueMSX on my pc.

Dubaron Disk Image does exactly what you need. I've used it with my MSX CF cards to use them with BlueMSX.

Hmm... In order for the Dubaron thing to work, the HDD should first be connected to the Windows PC, am I right? Windows has got the tendency to put folders like 'Recycled' and 'System Volume Information' on there without prior consent. So I reckon this is not a good idea. Better try to hook it up to linux/BSD or the likes and use native software like dd, just like Vincent van Dam indicated.

If you have a Sunrise CF interface, you can also choose to copy all content from the HD to a CF using just plain old MSX-DOS, this way you dont have to worry about what a PC might do to your drive. The content of the CF you can copy to a folder on your PC and mount that folder as a drive.

I think I will use a combination of things:

- Copy the whole msx hdd to a CF card using IDE-CF (all 6 partitions)
- Use Linux or "Hiren's Boot CD" to create a diskimage from the CF card.

This way the msx hdd cannot be damaged accidentally AND I don't have to worry about loosing files because non-ascii characters were used in the filename (>127). This last bit is the reason I do not want to use a file copy method but a bit-copy method instead.

I already mailed Rob Hiep to purchase a IDE-CF. Hope he still has some left...

The thing I need to know now is if the 'dd'-image will work with BlueMSX. To check this I already emailed Daniel Vic. If the image is not compatible then the best way is to create the cd-rom, as suggested. However, I'm afraid some files cannot be written to cd because of invalid filenames.