Amiga A500, booting workbench from SD card question

[Bmt_HR]

Hi Amiga friends

I have an Amiga 500 Rev. 6A and already bought TF530 accellerator card with IDE to SD card adapter. Kickstart Rom in AMiga is 2.0 (37.300) and I don't have an floppy disks.

How I can booting my Amiga Workbench from SD card and playing games from SD card.. I Found some instructions for WinUAE, but I'm without success to make this.

Maybe someone can help me or give some good instructions link?

Thank you all!

[psoma]

Your problem is the 37.300 ROM. Despite what others claim, 37.300 will only boot a DH0 partition under 40MB. To save yourself a world of pain, get your hands on a 37.350, or better yet, Kickstart 3.1 ROM and it should all fall into place...

[Bmt_HR]

Ok, Thank you! I'll bought KS3.1

[Jope]

Originally Posted by psoma

Your problem is the 37.300 ROM. Despite what others claim, 37.300 will only boot a DH0 partition under 40MB. To save yourself a world of pain, get your hands on a 37.350, or better yet, Kickstart 3.1 ROM and it should all fall into place...

So where does this 40MB number come from? :-) A great mystery if there ever was one.

[Toni Wilen]

Originally Posted by psoma

Your problem is the 37.300 ROM. Despite what others claim, 37.300 will only boot a DH0 partition under 40MB.

No. It still isn't true.

I just tested (yet again). Real A600 + official 37.300 ROM + 2G partition (CF in CF adapter). It boots normally.
(And there is no technical reasons whatsoever that would somehow cause problems if drive is >40M)

[Bmt_HR]

Originally Posted by Toni Wilen

No. It still isn't true.

I just tested (yet again). Real A600 + official 37.300 ROM + 2G partition (CF in CF adapter). It boots normally.
(And there is no technical reasons whatsoever that would somehow cause problems if drive is >40M)

Great, Can you give some instructions how I can make bootable SD card for my A500?

[Toni Wilen]

You really need floppy drive or some other working media to confirm if drive is detected (scsi.device appears in device list and hdtoolbox detects the drive) or if there are some other problems.

Most likely reason is simply incompatible hardware if drive boots normally in emulation when mounted as full drive using IDE emulation with matching KS ROM and hardware.

[Bmt_HR]

OK, I loose my workbench disks (get Amiga from attic after 25 years) and I cannot boot my Amiga from floppy... somewhere I found that I can make bootable SD card in Amiga emulator on PC, is that true?

[arnljot]

Yes, using either WinUA or FS-UAE you can prepare a SD card that can be used on a real amiga.

I recommend buying Amiga Forver, you can have it for instant download. You'll then get ADF versions of the Amiga OS floppies that you can use to install to the SD card.

I once set up a tutorial on Amibay on how to do this under WinUAE, but it's obsolete now since the images are not hosted anylonger on Dropbox public. I might fix it some day, but for now it's text only which isn't so helpful.

Point is that you need to give WinUAE hw access to the SD card, then you can write a real RDB (Ridgid Disk Bootblock) to it. This way it'll be usable to the Amiga.

The upside is that you can also take a directory on your PC and also have it as a hd in WinUAE, so here you can put tools and files from Aminet that you then can copy over to your SD card after you have formatted it with your Amiga running in WinUAE.