Building a CF hd on A3000 or A4000
 

Hi all,

I gone through a fair bit of video how to's on using a cf card on an amiga via a i386 machine and win uae with little success, meaning out of countless attempts I was able to format and install the os as a boot able hd just one time.

Is their any faq's, readme's or ? avalable on how to use a real a3000 or a4000 to partition and format a CF card on a real machine? I've tried a mix of 512m, 2 gig, 4 gig and 16 gig cards. I'd like to use the 16g card as a mix of os/work/games spread across different partitions, but the Windows/WinUae doesn't seem to work.

under amigaos you can create a or plus partition with hdtoolbox on cf max 8giga without problem

for use under winuae you need add the cf selecting thr right adapter

(For an A4000) You cannot have one single partition on a 16GiB card and boot with Kickstart 3.1 or lower.

The scsi.device in Kickstart3.1 is limited to the first 2GiB, 4GiB or 7.8GiB depending on what filesystem you're using.

If you are using standard FFS you have to have your boot partition under 2GiB and on the first 2GiB of the CF card.

If you are using PFS3AIO (recommended) you have to have your boot partition under 7.8GiB and on the first 7.8GiB of the CF card.

Remember also you will need MAXTRANSFER set to 0x1fe00 or you will get data corruption

You can, if you connect the CF card to the SCSI controller and use a Direct-SCSI file system.

It might even work on IDE in the rare case that the CF card reports "illegal" CHS values covering the entire capacity. Normally CHS is limited to 16384/16/63 which results in a capacity of 7.8 GiB.

Generally speaking: if the file system supports the entire capacity of the harddrive, you can make a single boot partition which covers the entire capacity.

MaxTransfer should always be set to 0x1fe00. It does not hurt if it is not needed but it is essential if it is needed. So just get used to it and you are safe everywhere.