Drives¶

Hard Disks¶

Directories¶

When mounting a directory as hard disk in WinUAE, files will be placed into the host directory. However, the Amiga file systems used different and/or additional meta information, such as protection flags, file comments or characters in file names that Windows does not allow. Depending on your host file system, WinUAE will store this extra information in a file called UAEFSDB inside each directory. This can be turned off with Disable UAEFSDB-support on the CD & Hard Drives page.

Hardfiles¶

Hard disk files are large files that contain the image of an Amiga file system. They work much the same way as a disk file. You can simply create a large empty file and tell UAE to use it as a hardfile, but you will need to format it from the emulation before you can actually use it.
If you want to boot an FFS formatted hardfile under Kickstart 1.3, you need the FastFileSystem file from the L: directory of a Workbench 1.3 disk. Place it in the same directory as the Kickstart ROM file, or select it in the FileSys field of the hardfile settings.

Hardfiles are mounted automatically at boot time, and you can boot from them, even under Kickstart 1.3 and older. If you ticked Do not mount in the hardfile settings, the hardfile is only attached to uaehf.device and you can mount it later yourself. To do this, add the following to "DEVS:mountlist":

UAE0:
Device = uaehf.device
Unit = 0
Flags = 0
Surfaces = 1
BlocksPerTrack = 32
Reserved = 1
Interleave = 0
LowCyl = 0 ; HighCyl = 511
Buffers = 5
DosType = 0x444F5300
BufMemType = 1

You may need to adjust the values if you specified a different geometry, and/or your hardfile has a different size than 8MB, and/or the hardfile is not mounted as UAE0: because you mounted other hard disks before it. Then, type "mount UAE0:" (or put that command in your startup-sequence), and you should be able to access it. Don't forget to format it with the AmigaOS!
If using HDToolbox to manage Hard files, you must create hardfile normally or use hard disk image from your real Amiga but clear all hardfile parameters except block size (sectors, surfaces and reserved). HDToolBox must be run with "uaehf.device"-parameter ("tools/hdtoolbox uaehf.device")

Mounted Drives¶

If Add PC drives at startup is enabled on the CD & Hard Drives page, the following conventions apply for mounting drives:

• If the drive-letter has a Windows volume-name associated with it, the drive will get mounted in the Amiga using its volume-name. On PCs, the volume name can be set via the Properties of the drive in Windows Explorer.
• If no volume-name, the drive gets assigned an Amiga volume-name based on its drive-type (the 'x:' is the PC drive-letter):

NOTE: If a drive doesn't currently have a disc in it (floppy, CD-ROM, etc.), then this option will NOT mount the drive for use by the Amiga. With Automount removable drives enabled, it gets mounted as soon as a disc is inserted.