Setting up Amiga Forever, which includes a ready to run Amiga emulation with a preinstalled Workbench environment, is like purchasing a new Amiga computer. Inevitably, some items may need to be copied or reinstalled. At the same time, this is often a good opportunity to put some order in the files which accumulated over the years. This tutorial will guide you through various background and reference articles covering this topic.

Reading Amiga Floppy Disk Data

Amiga floppy disks cannot be read on the PC without additional hardware. The simplest way to read Amiga floppy disks on the PC is to connect the PC to an Amiga with a null-modem serial cable (or over an existing TCP/IP link), and transfer the data with Amiga Explorer.

For disks containing games, check first if the game is already available in a downloadable format (see the download links at the Amiga Forever Home Page, or do a Google or other search engine search with keywords like "Game Name ADF").

If you have a lot of Amiga floppy disks, or if you do not have a working Amiga available to use Amiga Explorer, you may consider a high end option such as the Catweasel PCI board. This solution is faster than Amiga Explorer over a null-modem serial cable, and does not require an Amiga computer to read the floppy disks.

If you only need to convert a few Amiga disks, you may want to consider Cloanto's data conversion service instead of doing the work yourself.

In general, if you have data or software on Amiga-formatted floppy disks, we recommend that you read the following article:

• 3-167 - Archival of Amiga Floppy Disks

Reading Amiga CD Data

Amiga CD-ROMs can be directly read under Windows and other operating systems, and as such they are accessible by the emulation software.

A few Amiga programs may require special handling:

• 4-115 - Installing Amiga Software

A possible problem exists with "Amiga OS 3.5" and "Amiga OS 3.9" CD-ROMs, which contain illegal volume names (there is a "." character in the volume name, which is not allowed for by the original ISO 9660 CD-ROM file system specification):

• 3-123 - Amiga Forever and "Amiga OS 3.5" and "Amiga OS 3.9"