Wild backup of my F030 IDE hard drive

[f4brice]

Hello.

I'm Fabrice, 37, living in France.
I own a Falcon030 with a 10 GB IDE hard drive + HDDRIVER 6.30.
This hard drive is partitionned into several units (C, D, E, ...).
There's a lot of important data (source code mainly) on this hard drive, and I'm trying to backup my files.

Using something like GhostLink is not a good idea in my case : there's too many data to transfer.

What I did is to connect the IDE hard drive to a PC and boot to Ubuntu.
Ubuntu did find a drive (/dev/sda), but I think it didn't recognize the partition data.
So, I simply run "dd if=/dev/sda of=file.bin" and now I have a big 10 GB file which is a raw copy of my hard drive.
The hard drive has been connected back to the F030 and is still working fine.

My idea is to mount F030 partitions On Linux using the "mount -o loop -t msdos [...]" command.
How can I find starting sector & size for each partition ?
With an HEX editor, I could locate some "GEM", "BGM", "XGM" tags, but I don't know to read partitions infos.

Thanks for your help.

Regards,

Fab

[uweseimet]

You have to configure your kernel to also recognize Atari compatible partition schemes. It might be required to build a new kernel with the required settings. If the kernel is configured correctly Atari partitions will automatically be found when mounting the image. Editing partition data with a hex editor won't help, by the way.

Please remember that this is a forum for HDDRIVER-specific questions. Your question is a rather Linux-specific question, so a Linux forum is probably a better place to look for help.

[f4brice]

Hallo Uwe, thanks for your reply.

I forgot to mention that my Linux kernel DOES have Atari partitions-support enabled.
My question was not about Linux, I can handle this part by myself and I would not have post a question here.
My question was about HDDRIVER, and the way it stores partition information on the hard drive.
Sorry if it was not clear.

I'd like to know how partition information is written onto the hard drive by HDDRIVER.
Maybe there's only 1 way to write it, and HDDRIVER does it in the only "official Atari-standard" way.
If so, I'll find documentation by myself on this Atari-standard.
If not, I'd like to understand how HDDRIVER writes its partition data. Is it the right place here for such a question ?

Regards,

Fab

[uweseimet]

HDDRIVER uses the official Atari partitioning scheme, just like AHDI and most other hard disk drivers for the Atari. This partitioning scheme is well documented and it should be no problem to find information about it in the internet.
Anyway, as already mentioned Linux should able to access Atari compatible drives or images without having to manipulate the partition table. I have mounted SCS drives with Atari partitions in the past and Linux had no problem accessing the data. Note, however, that for IDE drives/images it may be necessary to byte-swap the image data first because the byte-order used by the Atari to write data to IDE drives is different from the byte-order used by PCs.

[f4brice]

Hallo Uwe.

Thanks again for your answer.

Regards,

Fab