Format a CF card on A1200 HDToolBox ?

[Andymiga]

I've been installing ClassicWB onto my 4GB CF card, which I'm going to use with the IDE adapter I have.

So far, so good: the System.zip is made in WinUAE.

The problem is that I cannot format my 4GB CF card with my A1200. HDToolBox (from the WB 3.1 disk) sees the drive like this:

Interface = SCSI
Address = 0
LUN = 0
Status = Unknown


When I click "Change drive type", the default values are set as around 20MB.

If I click "Define new..." and from there "Read Configuration", it reads the CF card and says: "Unit is not a disk (7)!".

The values are changed to these:

Cylinders: 7964
Heads: 16
Blocks per track: 63
Blocks per cylinder: 1008

But the size is set to: -180952K (-176 Meg)


What's wrong?

Is it even possible to prepare the HD (CF card) like this, or should I try using WinUAE instead?


I'm sorry for the noob question but I've been reading these (keyword: ide, cf, compactflash, format, prepare) threads for hours now and can't really make head or tail of it all. Getting very confused and also frustrated (which is very unlike me...)

There must be something I have overlooked I guess?

I'm very grateful for any help!

[Hungry Horace]

i think i had a similar problem for a while... thus why I did it all on WinUAE!

i may even have used HDtoolbox with OS3.9. I think it has trouble identifying the unformatted card as a drive with certain CF-IDE interfaces.

[thomas]

What's wrong?

Nothing is wrong. All values are correct. Just proceed to create partitions.

HDToolbox cannot display values bigger than 2,147,483,648 (that's 2GB) correctly. But it works correctly internally, though.

[Andymiga]

OK Thomas and HH, thanks.

The format worked and now I'm partitioning the drive in WB 3.1 HDToolBox.

I'm making a 250MB boot partition, and setting the rest (around 3.7 GB) for data (=games). AFAIK, there is no 2GB limit on the Amiga side (only a 4GB limit)?

Now, about the MaxTransfer value ... I've read the following: 0x1fe0, 0x1fe00, 0x1fe000, 0x1fe0000 (among others, but the ones with "1fe" are the most common on the forum). What is the correct value?

The mask is set as 0x7ffffffe (that's six times " f " in there) as default, is this ok?

I'm setting them as "Standard File System", with:

"Fast File System" checked ON
"International Mode" checked ON
"Directory Cache" set to OFF

with a block size of 512.

Finally, the partitions are named as DH0 and DH1 (I guess the ClassicWB installer needs the first partition be named as DH0 to succeed).

Phew, this is a lot of parameters to get right

[Hungry Horace]

0x1fe00 (just posted this elsewhere!)

although i've always used SFS:

http://wiki.abime.net/amiga:killergo...d?s=hdd%20real

[alexh]

Originally Posted by Andymiga

Now, about the MaxTransfer value ... I've read the following: 0x1fe0, 0x1fe00, 0x1fe000, 0x1fe0000 (among others, but the ones with "1fe" are the most common on the forum). What is the correct value?

AFAIK there is no true correct values but IDE devices, particularly CF cards, are susceptible to corruption if the value is set too high.

The most regularly supported maximum transfer sizes in IDE are either : 128Kbytes or 64Kbytes. By specifying a max transfer just below either of these two almost guarantees compatibility. The lower it is, the less data is transferred in a single command. Not that big a deal from a performance point of view.

128K-1 = 0x1FFFF
64K-1 = 0xFFFF

So people have been recommending 0x1FE00 and 0xFE00 as being close to these magic 128k and 64k limits. Why they don't recommend the limits I dunno. Where the other strange values came from, again I dunno (they didn't work for me, 0xFFFE was the largest I could use).

You have to try one and see what works well for you. You know fairly soon on if you have the wrong values. You get CRC errors all the time.

[Andymiga]

Well, everything seems to work fine finally. Pure WHDLoad bliss

I used Fast File System and the values I described above for the partitions.
The MaxTransfer was set to 0x1fe00 (only two zeros).

I'm going to go through the same again when Bloodwych releases the final Xmas release --- but then I already know how things work. Really, when you've gone through all the install hassle once it must be much easier next time!

Thank you everyone for the help! I like EAB. It's a friendly place

[TheCorfiot]

@Andy

I'm surprised you got the second partition >2GB to be reliable as i thought each partition had a max of 2GB with 4GB total under OS3.1 with FFS

TC

[Andymiga]

Originally Posted by TheCorfiot

@Andy

I'm surprised you got the second partition >2GB to be reliable as i thought each partition had a max of 2GB with 4GB total under OS3.1 with FFS

TC

Sorry, that was wrong info --- I actually partitioned them like this, changed my mind in the last minute:

1st: 250 MB (System)
2st: 1900 MB (Games)
3st: 1600 MB (Demos)

Those are rough values, can't remember the exact ones, but anyway they are all under 2GB.

I read somewhere that the 2GB limit is only for when the CF card is connected to a PC for transfering files on it. (Sounds like a PC DOS FAT16 limit to me, I have no clue what FAT16 has anything to do with all this though...)

And I haven't even tested it very thoroughly yet, but all partitions seem to work fine and the few games I tried worked brilliantly.

Is there any speed / size (block size?) advantage to using something else than FFS?

The next thing to do is to connect an A600 keyboard to this A1200 ... but that's a totally different (and very hairy) project