Amiga SD Creator

A desktop utility for Windows and Linux (Debian, Ubuntu, Raspberry Pi OS) that prepares, diagnoses, backs up and fills SD cards for Amiga computers, without needing HDToolBox on the Amiga.

• Apollo A6000: FAT32 data-transfer cards for the SD slot, and Amiga hard-drive (RDB) cards.
• Classic Amigas (A500, A600, A1200, A2000, A3000, A4000, any other RDB machine, WinUAE): SD/CF-to-IDE hard-drive cards laid out exactly like a real Amiga hard drive, with Kickstart-aware size limits. Also FAT32 transfer cards, FAT32 USB sticks for Gotek/FlashFloppy, and PiStorm (Emu68) SD cards (FAT32 boot partition + Amiga 0x76 partition with an RDB). For PiStorm the app downloads the latest Emu68 release from GitHub and installs it; you can add your own Kickstart ROM and set it up for a Framethrower video board (720p/1080p 50 Hz, pixel-perfect or smooth scaling).
• Diagnose an existing card without changing it, including likely reasons for an "Uninitialized" volume.
• Amiga Files: drag and drop files between your computer and the FFS partitions on a card or image.
• Backup & Restore whole cards, with SHA-256 checks and read-back verification.

Version 1.0. The on-disk formats are verified against independent tools (see Verification), and the Apollo A6000 FAT32 transfer card has been tested on real hardware. Hardware test reports for other machines are welcome.

Using it

1. Run AmigaSdCreator.exe (Windows) or Amiga SD Creator from the applications menu (Linux). Writing to cards needs administrator (Windows) or root (Linux) rights, and the app offers to restart elevated when that's required.
2. Select SD Card. Only USB/SD card readers are offered. The system disk is always protected.
3. Choose your Amiga (top-right dropdown) and a configuration tile (e.g. File Transfer or Hard Drive).
4. Check the summary (partition scheme, filesystem, partitions, boot partition, Kickstart, unused space).
5. Press Prepare SD Card, review what's on the card now, and type ERASE.
6. The app writes the layout, reads every structure back, and verifies it.

Customise partitions… opens the full wizard: partition sizes, DosTypes, MaxTransfer, boot priority, and embedding a filesystem handler such as pfs3aio. Create an image file instead builds the same layout as a .img/.hdf file.

If your Amiga says "Uninitialized"

Run Diagnose, pick the card and the slot you use it in. Common findings:

Finding	Meaning
exFAT	Most cards over 32 GB ship as exFAT. Amiga FAT handlers need FAT32.
GPT, or no MBR	The documented A6000 recipe is MBR + one FAT32 partition.
Leftover RDB behind an MBR	The card was once an Amiga hard drive, then reformatted on Windows. Amiga drivers find the old RDB first.
RDB partition with no filesystem	Normal for new partitions: format them on the Amiga.
PC layout used as a hard drive	Amiga hard drives need an RDB. The card isn't damaged.

The tool never calls a card "corrupt" just because Windows can't read it. Windows can't read Amiga partitions by design.

What gets written

Configuration	Layout
File Transfer	MBR, one partition type 0x0C at 1 MiB, FAT32 written by this app's own formatter (fatgen103 rules, fat32format/Rufus cluster table). The label is SD0 for the A6000, as Apollo's FAQ instructs.
Hard Drive	RDB at block 0 (RDSK, PART, FSHD/LSEG), 16 heads × 63 sectors, partitions cylinder-aligned after a ≥1 MiB RDB area. OFS/FFS partitions can be formatted immediately; PFS3/SFS partitions are left blank for the Amiga's Format.

Before writing, the first and last 1 MiB of the card are cleared so that no stale MBR/GPT/RDB remains.

Linux

Install the package for your machine from the releases page:

sudo apt install ./amiga-sd-creator_<version>_amd64.deb     # PCs
sudo apt install ./amiga-sd-creator_<version>_arm64.deb     # Raspberry Pi OS 64-bit, other ARM64

Then start Amiga SD Creator from the applications menu, or run amiga-sd-creator. The app opens as your normal user and can list cards. To read or write them, press Restart as root: polkit asks for your password and reopens the app with access to the card. The asdc command-line tool is installed too.

How the Linux version differs from the Windows one:

• Cards are found with lsblk. A disk is protected if it, or anything stacked on it (LVM, LUKS, RAID), holds /, /boot, /usr, /var, /home or swap.
• Before writing, the card's mounted partitions are unmounted, and the device is opened with O_EXCL, so the kernel refuses the write if anything still uses the card.
• FAT32 partitions mounted by your desktop (for example /media/you/SD0) appear on the Files page. For PiStorm cards, the app mounts the new boot partition itself to install Emu68 if the desktop doesn't.
• Settings and logs are in ~/.local/share/AmigaSdCreator. Files the root app saves in your home folder are given back to you.

Safety

• Inspection is read-only; disks are opened read-only unless a write was confirmed.
• System, boot and page-file (swap) disks can never be written, whatever the settings. Internal (SATA/NVMe) disks and disks over 512 GB are blocked unless enabled in Settings.
• The card's identity (path, model, serial, unique ID, size, sector size) is captured when you select it. It is re-checked right before writing and again after opening the device. If anything differs, or the card has gone, nothing is written. The app never falls back to another disk.
• Volumes on the card are locked and dismounted (Windows) or unmounted and opened exclusively (Linux) before raw writes.
• Interrupted writes are reported as such ("the card is now incomplete"), never as success.
• Logs (%LOCALAPPDATA%\AmigaSdCreator\Logs on Windows, ~/.local/share/AmigaSdCreator/Logs on Linux) use disk numbers and a short hash. They never contain serial numbers or file contents, and your user folder path is masked.

Building

Requirements: .NET 10 SDK. The WPF app and Windows layer build on Windows. The core library, shared view models (AmigaSdCreator.Ui), the Linux app (AmigaSdCreator.Desktop, Avalonia), CLI and tests build and run on Linux.

dotnet build AmigaSdCreator.sln
dotnet test tests\AmigaSdCreator.Core.Tests
dotnet run --project src\AmigaSdCreator.App

Release packages: pwsh build\publish.ps1 runs the tests and produces in artifacts\:

• AmigaSdCreator-<ver>-win-x64-portable.zip: self-contained single-file app; no .NET install needed.
• asdc-<ver>-win-x64.zip: command-line tool.
• AmigaSdCreator-<ver>-setup.exe: only if Inno Setup 6 is installed. build\installer.iss has not yet been compiled.

Linux packages: build/package-deb.sh runs the tests and produces artifacts/amiga-sd-creator_<ver>_amd64.deb and _arm64.deb (self-contained; no .NET install needed). Run the Linux app from source with dotnet run --project src/AmigaSdCreator.Desktop.

Command-line tool (image files only)

asdc profiles
asdc create data.img --size 8G --interface a6000-sd-data
asdc create hdd.hdf  --size 4G --interface a1200-ide --use BootableSystem --mode ks31
asdc inspect card.img --interface a6000-sd-data --report report.md

asdc never opens physical disks.

Verification

• 102 automated tests (tests/AmigaSdCreator.Core.Tests): partition tables, FAT32, FFS, the FFS file engine, layout limits, diagnostics fixtures (exFAT, GPT, stale RDB, superfloppy, unformatted RDB), safety gate, backup/restore including gzip, a fake-capacity card, an interrupted write, and the Linux disk layer's lsblk/mount parsing.
• Interop with amitools 0.8.1 (rdbtool/xdftool, an independent implementation): our RDBs pass rdbtool info/show, and we read rdbtool-made RDBs. Our FFS volumes are readable and writable by xdftool. Files we write are unpacked byte-for-byte by xdftool (OFS and FFS, including extension blocks), and we read files xdftool wrote. These tests run automatically when amitools is installed:

  uv venv ~/.cache/asdc-tools/venv && uv pip install --python ~/.cache/asdc-tools/venv/bin/python amitools==0.8.1
  

  (or set ASDC_AMITOOLS_BIN). amitools is GPL-2.0; it's used only as a test oracle and isn't distributed.
• FAT32 output was cross-checked with pyfatfs (reads, writes, lists).

See docs/VERIFICATION.md for what still needs real hardware.

Documentation

• docs/ARCHITECTURE.md: structure, design decisions, phase status
• docs/A6000-RESEARCH.md: Apollo A6000 storage findings, sources and open questions
• docs/VERIFICATION.md: verification status and the hardware test checklist

Not included

No Kickstart ROMs, AmigaOS/Workbench files, ApolloOS images or third-party filesystem handlers are bundled. Emu68 (MPL-2.0) is downloaded from its GitHub releases only when you prepare a PiStorm card. Supply your own licensed copies (for example pfs3aio from Aminet, or the ApolloOS image from Apollo).