If you ever wanted to be able to clone you Amiga's Harddisk to another disk
outside your Amiga or just want to create an byte-by-byte-backup of you disks,
this is definitely for you. Well, at least as long as you're not relying on your
Windows or MAC-PCs.
Also you shouldn't consider AmiNBD as an in any way completed or even tested
software. I'm providing it in an very early state "as-is", without any
guarantees.
AmiNBD gives you the ability to export your SCSI-Harddisk to any computer with
an NBD client. As of today, this is true for Linux 3.6 and above and for some
BSDs. And as long as you still have an running Amiga with TCP/IP running, you
can use AmiNBD also to restore your Image!
Remember that the requirement to use Linux or BSD as the servers OS also means
that you can also use devices like tiny OpenWRT-Boxes in that place. Just grep
an USB-Stick, stick it into your tiny whatever, connect it to your Amiga's
network and go ahead.
AmiNBD uses generic SCSI-commands through your SCSI Host Bus Adapter to
communicate directly with your harddisk. This means that:
- your Amiga itself does not have any chance to see any changes you're writing,
so be carful!
- any software-imposed limitation in your Amiga regarding the size of the disk
does not apply. You can even serve disks greater than 2T, if you can connect
them to your hardware. However, your Amiga won't be able to handle these large
devices for itself.
- this will really work with SCSI-devices only.
Usage:
Just start it, AmiNBD takes no arguments or any other configuration. It will
just export all disks it finds. You can use your favorite nbd-client's list
option to see your exported disks:
root linux:~>nbd-client -l youramiga
Negotiation: ..
IBM:DDRS-34560:RD1V9392
SGI:IBM:RD136241
rootlinux:~>
As you can see from the example output of my own Amiga above, the disks get
listed one by line. AmiNBD provides an uniqe name for each disk constructed out
of its Vendor, Model and Serial number.
Next step:
rootlinux:~>nbd-client -N IBM:DDRS-34560:RD1V9392 a2k.flatnet -b 512 /dev/nbd0
Note that the blocksize has to be set to 512 bytes for now. Your Linux-kernel
should now log something like:
nbd0: detected capacity change from 0 to 4569600000
nbd0: RDSK (512) p1 (DOS^E)(res 2 spb 2) p2 ((res 2 spb 1) p3 ((res 2 spb 1)
What gets logged exactly depends on your kernel configuration. It's quite
helpful to have CONFIG_AMIGA_PARTITION enabled, otherwise your kernel can't
parse your Amigas partition table.
However, from now on you have access to your Amigas harddisk. The whole disk
device is /dev/nbd0, which is corresponding to /dev/sda for the first disk in
your linux box.
The simplest thing you can do now is:
rootlinux:~>dd if=/dev/nbd0 of=/tmp/amigaDiskBackup
Or, if you want to take a look onto your Amigas disk:
rootlinux:~>parted /dev/nbd0
GNU Parted 3.1
Using /dev/nbd0
Welcome to GNU Parted! Type 'help' to view a list of commands.
(parted) print
Pralloc = 0, Reserved = 2, blocksize = 1, root block at 283008
Model: Unknown (unknown)
Disk /dev/nbd0: 4570MB
Sector size (logical/physical): 512B/512B
Partition Table: amiga
Disk Flags:
Number Start End Size File system Name Flags
1 10.8MB 279MB 268MB DH0 boot
2 279MB 2427MB 2148MB DH1 hidden
3 2427MB 4568MB 2141MB DH2 hidden
As parted shows us, nbd0p1 is our DH0-partition. The other two partitions are
PFS-filesystems, which Linux can't handle. Knowing this and if you have loaded
the nbd-module with partition support:
rootlinux:~>mount -t affs -o ro /dev/nbd0p1 /mnt/mnt
rootlinux:~>cd /mnt/mnt
rootlinux:~>ls
Addons Expansion.info PSI T
Addons.info Fonts PSI.info ToccataTools
C Icons Patterns ToccataTools.info
CV64-3D Icons.info Patterns.info Tools
CV64-3D.info Images Picasso96 Tools.info
Christmas-Look Images.info Picasso96.info Trashcan
Christmas-Look.info Internet Prefs Trashcan.info
Classes Internet.info Prefs.info Utilities
Developer L Rexx Utilities.info
Developer.info Libs Rexx.info WBStartup
Devs Libs.info Rexxc WBStartup.info
Devs.info Locale S install_log_file
DirOpus4 Locale.info Storage install_log_file.info
DirOpus4.info MUI Storage.info
Disk.info MUI.info System
Expansion Opt System.info
rootlinux:~>
You can event mount the partition read-write, but this can be dangerous! You
will write to the disk in your Amiga without giving AmigaOS any chance to take
notice about your modifications, so you may loose your filesystem!
Better use an unmounted disk for writing to your Amiga.
Note that I can test AmiNBD on my own Amiga only!
Use at your own risk. No warranty expressed or implied
AmiNBD is published under the MIT License.
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