Cloning drives/memory cards

[uweseimet]

With HDDRUTIL you can clone drives by dragging the source drive to the target drive in the devices window.
Something you might not like, though, is that the partitions of the target drive require precious drive IDs. If your source drive has 9 partitions (C:-K:), your cloned target drive would also have 9 partitions, but plain TOS does not supoort that many. (When running MagiC or MiNT this may not be a big issue, because more drive IDs are supported.)
Since HDDRIVER 12.6 you can avoid this problem with a special device configuration. In "Devices and Partitions", after a double click on a device ID you can edit several properties. (See the HDDRIVER manual for details.) In order to not assign IDs to a drive, deselect all LUNs. Now this drive will still be available in the devices window, but it does not use any drive IDs. Of course, the desktop cannot read or write data to this drive.

This setup can be useful in general, and in particular with the SD slot of the ATW800/2 transputer card. This is an internal slot, i.e. you usually do not change the SD card. A card in this slot is a good permanently available backup drive. You can create a backup by cloning your regular drive. Not having any drive IDs assigned to the SD card avoids an ID shortage.

In case you are using the modern GPT partition scheme, there is one thing to consider when cloning a drive: The GPT scheme stores a backup of the complete partition table on the last sectors of a drive. If you clone a drive to a larger drive, the last sectors of the target drive will not contain the required GPT data. Tools like HDDRUTIL will complain about the GPT backup not being valid.
This can easily be fixed: In HDDRUTIL select "Repair Partitions". HDDRUTIL will report that there is an issue with the partition table and will offer to fix it. Just let HDDRUTIL do the job, and there will be a valid partition table backup at the end of the target drive.