DISCUSSION A: Yes.
If the medium is formatted using an Amiga
file system, two approaches are possible to
let the Amiga emulation environment access
the content:
If the device is at risk of failing due
to age, the safest option is to create a
disk image as soon as possible, and then to
use that in an Amiga emulation environment.
Mounting the disk image or the physical
device within Amiga Forever to allow the
emulation environment (rather than the host
OS) to access the file-level content is
generally the best option because the Amiga
emulation environment has all the required
Amiga file system software layers, which the
host environment (e.g. Windows) doesn't
have. From inside the Amiga OS it is then
possible to copy the files to the Windows
side (e.g. by using a
shared volume).
There have been several efforts to create
Amiga file systems for use on different PC
operating systems. For example, Bill
Hawes of ARexx fame created an Amiga file system kernel module
which is included with many GNU/Linux distributions. This allows a
GNU/Linux environment to read the content of an
Amiga-formatted partition directly, without
resorting to the file system running in the
emulation. However, for Windows the most
practical solution is probably to let the
emulation read the Amiga file system as
proposed above.
Conversely, it is possible to install PC file system software on a "real"
Amiga. If a disk was formatted using the DOS file system on the Amiga, the PC
could read it directly. The commercial
CrossDOS software and
the free distribution fat95 and XFS programs (available on Aminet)
support Windows 95 long file names on the Amiga. MSH is also a reliable
program, but does not handle long file names. To avoid file name changes it is
generally prudent to archive the files to an LhA archive before moving them via
a non-Amiga file system. Within the Amiga Forever Workbench 3.X environment,
extracting an LhA archive is a matter of a simple drag-and-drop operation.
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