Internal IDE-CF
 

Hi. I haven't used my Amiga in about 5 years now so I can't remember much of anything about it. I've just been reading about IDE-CF readers and have some questions about them.

If I buy a 44 pin IDE to CF board (or is the old A1200 40 pin? I can't remember) will I be able to treat the CF card as a regular harddisk, or will I need to use drivers loaded from floppy? If it does work as a regular harddisk will formatting it as though it is one work?

Also, how will I be able to make my PC's media card reader understand the Amiga's filesystem? I'd just need to attach it to the PC the one time to install Workbench and all that quickly, instead of mucking about with floppies.


My machine specs, assuming the thing still works are:
Commodore A1200 with Blizzard IV 68030 with 16MB RAM
and a Squirrell SCSI card with 3.2x CD ROM Drive.


I also have a problem with my CD drive. Some years ago I took the drive apart but now I can't remember how the cables reconnect. It's the SCSI device number cables that I don't know where I should plug them back in. If I can get that working I wouldn't need to remove the CF card at all.

Thanks

Dan

I cannot understand why people bother with cf cards... why not get a normal 2.5" HDD or better yet a 4x adapter or a fastata1200?

btw, the cables u r holding are audio cables which connect the cdrom to the soundcard... there is no use in amiga for them, exept if u have a soundcard

Fastata 1200's RRP is about 70 euros, a 4x Adaptor is about 35 euros, according to the Elbox site, which looks like it hasn't been updated in years (Voodoo 3 3000 = 100euros?!) I'm not interested in upgrading my PC to PC standards - I already have a PC, and Amiga hardware is wildly overpriced IMO, looking at all the sites.

Besides, I already have a spare CF card, and IDE-CF adaptors are very cheap. I also like the idea of a fast booting, noise free computer, and I wouldn't need to write to the CF card much, if at all once everything is installed.

They aren't, they're coming out of the SCSI number selector. The audio cables are already connected from the RCAs to the CDROM - it's the grey cable with the metal cable tidy that's the audio line.

Heys Shrub, yeah i am with you on the Overpriced Amiga kit, seems that every retailor wants to abuse the comminuty in my book...

ok on the orgianl A12 its 44pin (the last four pins are power pins) i am sure you can find a pinout on google in 5 mins...

the only thig is on an a12 the IDE port is unbuffered so please be carful (if ya got an ide fix dongle *again google is good* should not have any problems attaching the CF card dongle to it... but if i may i can recomemned another option....

on ebay (*ebay uk*) you can get a 2.5" 44pin TO 40pin (inc 4pin power molex) Board for under £10 including delivery... AWSOME me thinks... thus why i have 2 :D)))

okay plumb that onto your A12 (ya can rob power from your floppy drive on this one) and powerup the +5 on the molex and your CF should just be read as a normal disk on that chain... whoot says i, i may even consider it.... CF is really cheap and noiseless.... and *PORTABLE!!!!!* but more so... i got 256mb stick kicking arorund... hell i got a 512mb stick doing F to the ALL of nothing.... hmmm sensing project....

if ya need some diagrams... i could draw them for you no worries :)

Cool idea for a miggy :))))) about time all that pointless PC muscle did something for the amiga scene....


okies Good Luck...

l8rs Z.

I can understand why they're so expensive, if there was more demand for Amiga hardware then prices will drop, but as it is it's only the ageing hippies of the .mod days who are hanging around lol. It's a shame.

I can't find "IDE fix dongle" on Google. I haven't even a clue what a dongle is to be honest lol.
There's a few 40 pin to 44 pin adaptors on eBay - I'm right in thinking these aren't "reversable", yeah?

ohoh, there's one 44 - 40 adaptor with a molex too. I'll need my flooppy drive, but it should be save to split that line into 2, yeah?

I'm a bit confused as to how a 40 pin device draws power. My PC's 3.5" harddisks have standard 4 pin molex that draw power directly from the PSU. I'm presuming there's another power line in the IDE cable itself, because none of these IDE-CF cards have other ways of powering. I probably should google this, but are the extra 4 pins on the 44 IDE; 5v, 12v, 5GND and 12GND?
I don't know if I'm explaining this right. a 3'5" drive uses 44s pins and a molex for power, and a 2/5" drive uses 44pins which include the necessary voltages, right? If the molex on the 44-40pin adaptor draws power from the Amiga's motherboard to a 3.5" drive, then would I need to use the floppy's molex at all - and seeing that the IDE-CF adaptor has no molex connector, so it's drawing power from a line in the 40pin cable already, yeah?

---I may as well ask here too: Will the old A1200's IDE controller support 2 IDE devices? If I can't get my SCSI drive working again then I'll consider using the spare IDE one I have as a slave to the CF card. If that doesn't work it looks like I'm going to be doing a lot of dog work with floppies.
Oh, yeah, it's a CDWR drive so will using generic CDRW drivers allow me to write to CD with it (Not that it's important anyway!)--

Ah, this could be handy. There are a few dual CF adaptors. So, if I format one of the CF cards with the amiga's file system and leave that as the boot drive, and format another CF card with cross dos (or whatever it was called - the file format drive "PC0:" uses - I can't remember now!!) in the Amiga, that second CF card will work on both systems and I can transfer data to bootable CF card with that?

okay okay okay..... all sounds yummy ....

lol

okay...

DONGLE = Device of some sort that is fan-dabi-dozie (see krankies for more detail)

One of those 44 to 40 pin converters are PERFECT for your needs however unless you have an specific IDE interface for the amiga you only get ONE ide chain which is unbuffered!! for instance yeah you could have two devices on ONE chain but as it is unbuffered it has a high level of chance in corrupting your data on either device.

this being said i did run my A12 with Hard disk and CDRW for the longest time but please be carefull i have seen and heard two many horror stories when it comes to amiga ide. my best advice would be for you to get the A1200 IDE interface if you wanna run more than one device...

Okay next Q.

Yeah even the native ide lines for the amiga have use a 3.5v + voltage for base current i believe (if not its gonna be close for that) if your CF doesn`t need it for the PC then it wont need it for the amiga so theres no problem there... the power is supplies right through the lines...

And next kinda Q.

If you need to you can suppliment the power requyire by the 4 pin molex (should you wish to run something that requires a lil more juice) from the disk drive.. split the lines there will be +5v 5vGnd (red and paired black) and 12v+ and 12vGnd (yellow and opposing black) i belive thats how its laid out to be honest a 2 second search on google should provide all the pin outs exactluy *wich i recomend before commencing any splicing of power for returing +12v on 5vGnd is not a good thing...*


okay lets see if i can do an diagram here for you..
(one sec PPAINTING A DIAGRAM)

a12 pinouts can be found

http://www.ntrautanen.fi/computers/h.../amiga_ide.htm

Mentioning pinout briefly not everything in life is either notched for fit or colour co-ordinated so PLEASE make sure that you have the correct pinout schematic for what ever product you bolt onto it.. I know the A12 ide is robust but a grounding 5 volts at 30+ watts are not nice amps for the CIA chips to handle (again be double sure ;)

Okay this is all from memory so again double check EVERYTHING!!!!

If you need extra juice you can supliment from the floppy drive, Clock port and LED port ( pin outs i think you can get from the above link.. )

Last kinda Q;

Okay hmmm 2 one with miggy dos and the the other ms dos... hmm
its certainly possible but remember that without a buffered interface a copy of idefix97 would be dab handy and is free to download.... check out the links in the FAQ section of EAB :)



I have included a couple of pinout config thingys for your leasure :)

BTW CF Hard disk for miggy!!!! AWSOME IDEA!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

i just love it... considering i have been geeking out over it for the last few hours LOL

Good luck Shrubs!!!

Ok, I think's all cleared up now. Thanks

I'd only have to run the CDROM drive the one time - I'll copy a load of C, libs, devs, blah blah blah, as well as Octamed Sound Studio and Personal Paint, and maybe some ADFs (if I can find them) to a CD from my PC, then use the CD on the Amiga's drive and copy it all to the 64MB card - which is enough. After that I wouldn't need the CD drive at all.

How much is an IDE interface? I've only seen the 4 IDE ones, and they're being sold at quite unreasonable prices on the "official" Amiga retailers.

I don't know if I'm pushing it's PSU to the limit already. I can power the CDROM drive from the PC. I shouldn't think the CF card would require much power - and with it installed I wouldn't need my Squirrel - I'm presuming they're about "pound-for-pound" when it comes to power comsumption. I think the Blizzard IV is one of the most power efficient '030s available too.
If I can't get 2 devices to work on IDE then I really need to get my SCSI CDROM drive sorted. I took it to bits a while back (it wasn't seeking properly) and can't remember where all the cables at the back go lol. I've mentioned this on the other prb.hardware forum (where this thread belonged lol). If I can get that working then I'd only have one drive on the IDE bus and that should be fine.

It is a good idea, shame it's not mine lol. I saw an article about booting PCs from 1GB USB drives, so I looked up articles on booting from CF, then found out about CF-IDE adaptors, then started looking for people who had done it with the Amiga.

Have you built/started building a CF equipped Amiga yet then? I saw somewhere that someone did it and their system booted up silently in less than 5 seconds! - Almost like creating a bootable RAM disk

I've just thought - I can install the IDE-CF adapter in my PC, and use UAE to format the card and install WB and other software, can't I? The PC would see the CF card as a regular IDE HD and so will UAE, right?

Not yet, but its a thought i am extremely thinking about lol....

But as a thought i wonder if its possible as a worse case scenario if WinUAE could perhaps format the CF card while attached to the PC ???? if so you could save so much time in setting up you amiga... lol

just get everything you want to run on it installed on WinUAE and then transpose the disk over to there....

getting a cf hd device and a cdrom to run could be a lil fun as the HD sets up the CDROMS landing zone (thats cyclic addresses) or sommink like that under the PC... i am unsure if the CF-converter can do that for the Miggy... technically it should as it treats the CF card as a transparent device for the HD controller for the native PC...

Anyways Shrub best of luck :).....may the force be with you.....

lol seems that i tapped out that post in post haste lol, i didn`t get to see the one you posted earlier shrubs, sorry about that...

just a quick note...

just bought
A CF to ide converter (£4.00 inc p&p) *ebay*
A 512CF card ( £20.00 inc p&p ) www.scan.co.uk *deal of the day*

£24.00 total

the look on *Keropi's* face when i tell him the other method how much the other method costs...

....£120.00 +

........Priceless

At a fith of the cost, its faster to boot too AND its a cheap upgrade that one can mod on a regular basis...

transport disks (adfs etc to the native amiga and back again...)

sneaker-net extreme!!!! with 512MB of store..

on a PC that ain`t much.... on an AMIGA its damn near everything!!!!!!

* just some numbers
£45 2.5" IDE HDD (10/20GB) www.eclipse-computers.com
£60 IDE INTERFACE (fast ATA 1200)www.amigakit.co.uk
£15 P+P *estimate on £7.50 average per store.
*

happy shoping shoppers...

Look's like that special offer has gone now. Not to worry, though, because I'm thinkin of buying a 1GB card for my GBA movie player and using it's current 512MB one for for Amiga.
Hehe, it looks like none of the emulators for the amiga need registering now. I tried getting a keyfile for amimastergear years back but I never got a response. Tihs should be great.

I've just ordered a CF-IDE and a 44-40 pin converter. The CF-IDE converter was actually cheaper to buy and ship from China than from the UK lol

It looks like my Amiga's working fine. I can't really test the floppy drive though because I don't have a bootable disk - I must have thrown out Workbench! I'm just hoping formatting and installing the CF with UAE works otherwise I'm screwed.

Erm, all this talk of CF adapters. I've tried several in A600 and they work fine. They dont use as much power as a 2.5" drive, they are smaller, quieter and 512Mbytes is quite a lot for a Classic ECS amiga.

Why get a 44-pin to 40-pin adapter?

When you can get a 44-pin compact flash adapters for the same price.

Yeah, I saw the 44 pin types on eBay, but I'd need a 44-40 pin adaptor to use the CF-IDE device on the PC for UAE to format and load files on.

Uh?

You mean you're not just going to get a card reader? I guess it's an extra expense

I don't think AUE can format drives in card readers but I'm going to find out for sure in a moment. Besides, if I get bored of my Amiga and can use the adaptor for putting Windows 98 on CF lol

One last thing. Which way round does the 44 pin connector go? On 40 Pin cables there's a notch on the connector, and a matching slot in the sockets, but on the Amiga, there's just a straight line of pins.

lol, shrubs.... asking that now is a little scairy.....

position the amiga (a1200) so that:

(a) you are looking down on it
(b) the backplate (where cables, monitor etc plug into) faces away from you
(c) the pinout is the bottm left but please check this
http://www.ntrautanen.fi/computers/h.../amiga_ide.htm

that will give you the proper pinout

(d) DOUBLE check the cfcard pinout!!!!!!! best way to check if you cannot find the pin out is

when i recieve mine i will put a howto together.... with pictures, notes, mothods and some nice cute cuddles too :)