well no idea how i did it (but i know i have a valid backup of that amiga drive, because it's recent and it runs on winuae) but looks like there's a newer fork of win32diskimager that can work with physical drives and not just drive letters https://github.com/dnobori/DN-Win32DiskImagerRenewal/releases
@mavica_again this is unbelievably useful, i may need to take backups of a few of my CF-outfitted machines