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polbit

Posted Tue Feb 15, 2022 5:57 pm

I'm used to my Amiga 500+ with ACA500+. It's great because it easily mounts a 2nd CF card that's readable on a PC, so transferring files is a breeze.

I just got a 3000, and installed a SCSI2SD. I have a Gotek I've been using to transfer files, but it's very painful. What's the best solution to transfer large files to my SD card? It is a v5.2 as I can't find v6 right now. Any hints would be appreciated!

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McTrinsic

Posted Wed Feb 16, 2022 2:35 am

The „best“ probably depends on your requirements.

One really good option is this.


If you are familiar with WinUAE this here also works quite good.

The latter works for me because I have an Amiga set up in WinUAE anyway. I use it for testing out software from Aminet and occasionally for gaming.

So what you need is to configure this virtual Amiga to access the PC‘s folders and access the SD card as a complete drive, bypassing *any* MS Windows drive management.

McT

User avatar
iljitsch

Posted Sat Feb 19, 2022 3:32 am

I wonder if it's possible to set up a "drive" (SD card in this case) with both FFS and FAT32 partitions in a way that both the Amiga and a PC will recognize... I guess the boot sector / partition table will be a problem.

I went a slightly different route with my 3000, and got the Buddha IDE adapter instead, with an IDE - CF card converter. With the right mountlist, that lets me mount FAT32 formatted CF cards without any trouble. (Well, except that the Buddha doesn't do hot swapping, so there's a bunch of rebooting / power cycling.)

But I guess in your case that won't do you much good unless the 3000 still has another SCSI drive that it can boot from and can copy data from the SD card to.

Of course my preferred way to copy data to/from my Amigas is over the network, with both the 3000 and the 1200 having had Ethernet cards since the 90s, and they know how to mount my NAS so that's all nice and seamless, just not very fast.

An X-Surf 100 card is almost 150 euros, though, so a bit steep just to transfer some data once in a while.

I guess what I would try is see if I can set up a serial port link between the 3000 and a modern computer and transfer the data that way. That should be a fair bit of tinkering and not very fast. But: cheap. At most a couple dozen dollars for a serial to USB adapter and maybe a cable. And although slow, it can run mostly unattended for arbitrarily large files without having to set up WinUAE and/or swapping SD cards or USB flash drives.

Another networking option that is easy and more affordable is PLIPBox, which is an Ethernet adapter that plugs in to the parallel port of any Amiga (the A1000 needs a special version). I think it's about $50 on Ebay. About 10 times faster than serial and 5 times slower than real Ethernet. 8-)

Yet another option: use WinImage or a similar tool to write files to a bunch of images on the Gotek USB stick, then mount those images on the Amiga and copy the data one at a time. Of course that would require some trial and error to get PC disk images on the Gotek to mount on the Amiga, and you may need to use another tool like RAR to split up large files and later stitch them back together. And keep changing virtual floppies on the Amiga side. I suppose there must be a way for the Amiga to talk to the Flashfloppy software on the Gotek to select a new image...

User avatar
McTrinsic

Posted Sat Feb 19, 2022 4:01 am

Did you read the first link I provided?

Pretty much describes your first scenario.





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