A2000 / Tandem IDE / CF / fat95 help

[system11]

Back in the day I had an A500 with 1mb chip and one external drive, so my exposure to bigger stuff is limited to 2 weeks about a decade ago, and recent experiences with repairing and upgrading it.

So I have:
A2000
KS/WB 2.0 currently
BSC Tandem IDE card
IDE-CF backplate adapter
4gb CF card

I hooked it up loosely today, I was able to use the original Tandem install disk to copy the AT driver into Expansions, once I'd done this and rebooted the bundled ancient HDtools was able to see and format the CF card. I initially created a 30mb partition, formatted and copied files to it - all working.

What I really want to do though, is use this as a data transit method - copy files to CF on my laptop, plug it into the Amiga, turn it on and copy them to the HD/wherever. I found out about fat95 from Googling which seems like the solution.

However, all the docs assume the user is using an A600/1200 - and I'm totally lost. Can someone tell me what I'm missing or what I need to learn about to get this working please?

[thomas]

Fat95 comes with a very detailed guide which tells you step by step how to build a mountlist or dosdriver for your PC harddisk resp. CF card.

You can even use the CF0 file which comes with compactflash.device as an example. All you need to change is Device = xxx and Unit = yyy to whatwever "ancient HDTools" is using.

[system11]

Double clicking that CF0 file results in a Guru for me, both on real hardware and UAE, with or without a mountlist entry - but I suspect that's wrong, can't find any relevant examples. Lots of references to HDToolBox in the readmes, is that an OS3 thing?

[system11]

Edit: I have it working... I'll be writing this up when I've retraced my steps exactly.

On to more specific problems.
When I mount CF0: it doesn't appear on the desktop, but if I cd CF0: then the icon appears after a short pause and everything behaves as expected. Is that normal, do I need something else in my MountList entry?

[thomas]

Add

Activate = 1

to the mountlist.

[system11]

Thanks, I tried that and it complained that Activate isn't a known mountlist entry, so I found from google that Mount = 1 is the same thing. After setting that I can mount the device and it automatically appears on the desktop.

Final questions:
Is it possible to get it to automatically mount this at boot (kind of expected 'mount' should mean that but apparently not)? Google suggests putting files in DOSDrivers but that's a 2.1 feature as far as I can tell.

[mark_k]

Create a file DEVS:MountList (if it doesn't exist already) and add an entry for the partition to it. Add a line like
Mount DRIVENAME:
to your startup-sequence.

[system11]

Thanks, done all of this. One strange thing I see - CF0: mounts fine, Amiga spots the AMIGACF: disk, but I have to dismount amigacf: and cf0: to unmount it. If I do cf0: only then amigacf: stays on the desktop, if I do the name only the icon disappears but I'm told cf0: is already mounted when I try to mount it again. It's like the OS considers them two separate things once mounted. Is that normal?

[A10001986]

1) IIRC Yes.

2) IIRC (well it's been a while): Unmounting never really worked (at least up until 3.0, which was after my Amiga involvement), always had memory fragments and other issues after trying this. (But I might be wrong about this; my vague recollection is something with Syquest always blocking the scsi bus after eject, and similar issues, and in general rebooting when unmounting/ejecting anything but a floppy disc.)