What is the fastest way to get images on my CF drive?

[Gul Dukat]

Hi EMUsers!
I managed now to replace my internal HDD in my Emulator III Keyboard with the CF Drive (Aztecmonster CF with a 1GB Sandisk Compactflash Card). Everything works fine and booting from CF is also no problem.
Before I start now to load single Banks via my external CDROM Drive and save Bank for Bank on the CF I ask for tipps if you have a good idea how to bring my favorite images (which I have as ISOs on my PC) on the CF card ?  I have the EMUser Adapter which is great for the EII and Emax but does not work on the EIII...
Is there a fast way to convert and save the banks on the CF drive?
Thanks for any hints.

[Wolfram]

If you are on OSX I have a program for you

[mg73]

I´m also curios of that program.

[esynthesist]

If the ISO files on your PC are ISO images of Emulator-III cdroms, you can simply do a raw copy of this ISO file to your CF card.
It's like restoring a hard disk. Of course you'll need a CF card reader connected to your PC.

On Windows you can use software like HDD Raw Copy Tool from HDDGuru.
(you can find this freeware here: http://hddguru.com/software/HDD-Raw-Copy-Tool/)
Simply select the ISO file as SOURCE, then the CF card drive as TARGET and start the copy.

As an alternative on Windows, you can use EMXP (http://www.emxp.net) to restore these ISO files to a CF card
(but you'll first have to replace the .ISO extension by the .EZ3 extension).
EMXP can also read/write/copy individual Emulator-III banks from/to EIII formatted CF cards.

For OSX I have no idea, but Wolfram seems to have interesting hints !

[esynthesist]

Perhaps one additional note.
If you restore/copy a full ISO image to the CF card, the Emulator-III may not be able to boot from the CF card anymore if the ISO image did not contain an operating system. That could be the case with ISO images taken from Emulator-III sound bank cdroms...
But even if that's true, EMXP can still be an alternative for fast copying all banks from the cdrom/ISO image to the CF card (you can select all banks at once on the cdrom/ISO image and ask EMXP to copy all of them to the CF card)

[mg73]

Aha  of course,thanks!

If the ISO files on your PC are ISO images of Emulator-III cdroms, you can simply do a raw copy of this ISO file to your CF card.
It's like restoring a hard disk. Of course you'll need a CF card reader connected to your PC.

[Gul Dukat]

Thanks for the hints - in particular to ESynthesist for the detailed info. That sounds like a plan and I will try to copy with HDDGuru or EMXP (I use it successfully on a old WinXP Laptop with my Emulator II). Now I need to check where to get a CF-Reader. I think I still have an old PCMIA-to-CF adapter in my box room. Will keep you posted.

[Gul Dukat]

Hi all.
I did this process now for a while on my Netbook PC and all worked fine! So far ... I could easily select and copy the files to a EIII image I created before with EMXP and finally used HDD Raw Copy Tool to bring the EIII image physically to the CF card. EIII could boot from the card and I could load all the banks in my EIII. Meanwhile even EMXP can copy the images to external media. But recently my PC decided for any reason not to work anymore :-(
I am an OS X user and the only reason to have a Windows PC was EMXP ... Fortunately this tool also works on OS X with Wine or Crossover Windows Emulation Tool. The only bad thing is that the option to copy also images to an CF/SD card with EMXP does not work on OS X. If I had a tool such as HDD Raw Copy which works on OS X it would save me getting a windows compatible PC since I could do everything on my Mac.
Any ideas/hints for tools or workarounds? I know the easiest way is to get another windows PC but I have all my libraries, doing sampling processing etc. on OS X and it's annoying to handle between the 2 systems..

[esynthesist]

Hi

This kind of tools exist for Mac OS as well.
Actually one of them is explained in the "EMXPv308_MacOSXWine_manual.pdf" manual that I included in the EMXP zip file.
(the tool is called DD-Rescue GUI)

It's indeed frustrating that Wine does not allow raw disk access. I'm still hoping that the Wine community will add this possibility. Once that would be available, EMXP would also be capable of reading/writing/formatting disks on Mac OS. At this moment these functions only work for disk images, not for disks themselves.

(another option would be that I create a Mac version of EMXP... but that won't be easy, so I keep postponing this plan  )

///E-Synthesist

[Wolfram]

Hello Gul Dukat,

as I already posted here before I have written a program for OSX.
If you want it send me a PM.

[Gul Dukat]

Hi

This kind of tools exist for Mac OS as well.
Actually one of them is explained in the "EMXPv308_MacOSXWine_manual.pdf" manual that I included in the EMXP zip file.
(the tool is called DD-Rescue GUI)

It's indeed frustrating that Wine does not allow raw disk access. I'm still hoping that the Wine community will add this possibility. Once that would be available, EMXP would also be capable of reading/writing/formatting disks on Mac OS. At this moment these functions only work for disk images, not for disks themselves.

(another option would be that I create a Mac version of EMXP... but that won't be easy, so I keep postponing this plan  )

///E-Synthesist

Shame on me. I should have read the fucking manual !!! ;-) I already started studying the PDF but did not reach that part with "Step 4 - COPY THE ISO IMAGE TO THE SAMPLER DISK". That was the missing tool. I tried it and it works perfect !!
Thanks a million to synthesist who did a great job on EMXP - this precious tool ! Finally I can do everything on my Mac. A macOS version of EMXP would be highly appreciated by plenty of users!?
@Wolfram: Thanks for the offer - at the moment I am fine with the workflow with EMXP and the DDRescue