WinUAE can no longer be used to prepare a CF card for a real Amiga?
 

Current versions of WinUAE no longer have the -disableharddrivesafetycheck option but allow to write to a drive only if there are no Windows partitions on it.

However, thumb drives and card readers are treated by Windows as removable drives. Windows Disk Management does not allow to delete partitions from those drives and DiskPart does not show these drives at all.

I don't see any other Windows built-in method to erase flash drives for use with WinUAE.

My suggestion is either to change the "block zero write attempted" requester to have a Yes / No choice so that the user has an option to write to the disk nevertheless. Or to add an option to the "Add Harddrive" window to erase the MBR from the disk.

It has always been bad idea to write to disk if it is mounted in Windows.
Sometimes it appeared to work but nothing was actually written.

MBR/partition table must be erased, CF ejected and then re-inserted. Thats the only 100% safe way. Or use diskpart or any other utility that knows how dismount all partitions and tell Windows to re-read partition tables.

Agreed.


DiskPart does not show USB flash drives or card readers. That's my point.


Can you name one that works with USB flash drives or CF card readers?

I found dd for Windows, but it's an expert's job to identify the correct drive to write to.

diskpart "list disk" seems to work fine here with CF cards (USB reader) and USB sticks. (Win7 x64)

i use a usb multibay for my cf with win7 32 and diskpart works fine for me to. I use winuae 2.3 tho

I agree, I have been experimenting with a few different types of usb devices.
Thumb, stick and reader drives. Diskpart see's all fine.
USB devices used; Sandisk 2GB sticks, Sandisk 8GB thumb drive, Orca 8 in 1 Multi Card reader, Linksys 20 in 1 Multi Card reader.

@Toni can you tell which release -disablesafetycheck was removed and what has replaced it, as this was one of my main issues with new versions.
I have to use earlier versions cause new version refuses to let me setup non rdb drive.

Use diskpart's CLEAN command.

Drive must be RDB partitioned or empty. The end. Anything else isn't safe or reliable.

Ah, so aslong as it has nothing on it at all, then you can use it as if you had disksafetycheck off (so to speak).
Why did it change? out of interest, cause it was nice and easy the old way.

On some systems/Windows versions, writing to drive that Windows recognises may do any of following:

- write actually succeeds (but this can cause major issues if Windows decides to write to the drive, for example it had FAT partition that had some data in write cache) It was important to reinsert the card after RDB was written.

- write appears to succeed (ok returned) but nothing was written. This was the cause for "block zero write failed"-message, after writing to block zero (and return code was ok), it re-read same block and checked if data matched.

- error is returned

I decided to only allow safest solution = drive that is guaranteed not mounted in Windows, blank or RDB partitioned.

Just to confirm: Diskpart deals with removable media under Windows Vista and 7, not XP.

On Linux you can use dd command.
On Mac OS you can use disk utility.
On Win XP you can use EaseUS Partition Master (Freeware).

This may help (for winodws 7 atleast).

If you have a card reader, add it in WinUAE, then save the config.
Now everytime I insert a fat formatted card, WinUAE assumes its empty and lets me alter it without using diskpart.

Obviously, I only use card reader for WinUAE / Amiga. So its not a problem.
I just always got worried while using diskpart, I would check it had right partition / disk selected about 5 or 6 times.

thank you for all