Task: Create a Hard Drive File (.HDF) for Booting in the Amiga WinUAE Emulator
Needed: WinUAE and Windows PC, Kickstart ROM
Time: 15-30 Minutes
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Introduction
I recently posted about preparing a compact flash (CF) or SD card using WinUAE to be used as a hard drive on your Amiga 600 or 1200 computer via the IDE connector. I also recently posted about installing Workbench as the OS and WHDLoad for booting games. Here, I modify the instructions to prepare a Hard Drive File (i.e. .HDF) as a virtual hard drive that can be saved on your computer and booted using the WinUAE emulator or on emulated hardware such as the a1200 NG.
Instructions
First, familiarize yourself with my post on preparing a CF / SD card as a hard drive. We will follow these instructions with several key differences.
Step 1 for preparing the CF card is not necessary. Skip this step.
In Step 2, instead of choosing ADD HARD DRIVE under CD and Hard Drives, we will choose ADD HARDFILE. The settings that worked for me are below. Make sure Read/Write is checked. Make sure Full Drive/RDB Mode is checked. When you check Full Drive/RDB Mode make sure that the Surfaces, Sectors, and Cylinders fields get set to 0. If not, uncheck and check the box again. Make sure they stay set to 0 before finalizing the setup. Choose Commodore A600/A1200/A4000 IDE as the HD Controller. I am using the PFS file system here as we did with the CF card setup. Choose the pfs3aio file in the FileSys box. Next, we need to create the New Hard Disk Image File at the bottom of the box. Choose PFS3 as the file system if this what you want to use. I set the size of my HDF to 500MB to make it easy to copy to a USB drive and port to my a1200 NG. Click the CREATE button once you have confirmed all settings and save. Set the Path this file at the top. Click OK at bottom and remember to save your configuration in WinUAE for later use.
All other steps should be the same.
Comments
Note that I had trouble with the primary Workbench partition being bigger than 1GB and the secondary partitions being bigger than 2GB.
Note that while this HDF booted fine in WinUAE I struggled to get it to consistently boot on my a1200 NG. Not sure why.
This setup will allow you to setup a custom hard disk with the Workbench you want and the files you need for go-to fun using WinUAE.