CF / SD and large drives FAQ

[Toni Wilen]

Originally Posted by esc

To confirm, this makes these CF cards ideal for Amiga usage, right?

Not sure about ideal but easier to use, for example all partitions (that use directscsi filesystem) are always available and usable even when cold booting without startup-sequence.

[Jope]

Originally Posted by fgh

If you have a >8gb card you can also check if it still does not provide 'illegal' CHS values, (like the SDHC version does, allowing larger than 8gb cards without scsi patches)
For that you need to check if 'read configuration' detects 7,8gb or the full size without os3.5/3.9 or scsi.device patches.

I remembered this one again, I just tried it on real HW with a 16GB SDHC card.

Unfortunately it only reports 7,8GB, CHS 16383/16/63

[ancalimon]

So which filesystems can we use on a very large partition? 112GB and 350gb to be precise. Only sfs2? Does pfs3 aio support partitions as large as these?

[appiah4]

I believe PFS3AIO limits are the same as PFS3, ie. 104G max size.

[ShK]

Originally Posted by appiah4

I believe PFS3AIO limits are the same as PFS3, ie. 104G max size.

Actually max partition size is ~101.5 GB (104*253*253*32 = 213 021 952 blocks).

[StingerHU]

I ran into a problem with ACA500 Plus. I've two brand new Sandisk 8GB Ultra CF cards with FAT32 (or without any partition) and trying to install WB3.1 using option F7 and doing the clean WB3.1 install from the booted Workbench, thru HDTools.

It seems HDTools is able to identify the card but shows unknown type. Tried to read the info and it worked fine but (showed the proper manufacturer, id but the wrong size OC) - unfortunately, I'm cannot do anything with them, cannot create a new partition or deleting/partitioning cause always get an install write error on disk block 880 and similar write errors.

Do you have any idea, what I'm doing wrong? Both cards are brand new, works fine under PCs well. Even I tried to use one of them in the AUX slot to update the firmware, and flash updater didn't found the file on the FAT32 formatted drive - but it's on the disk...

Any help appreciated, thanks.

[thomas]

Disk block 880 is the root block of a floppy disk, it has nothing to do with the CF card. Most likely your Install3.1 disk is bad. You should keep it write protected anyway. Drag HDToolbox to Ram Disk and run it from there.

[StingerHU]

Originally Posted by thomas

Disk block 880 is the root block of a floppy disk, it has nothing to do with the CF card. Most likely your Install3.1 disk is bad. You should keep it write protected anyway. Drag HDToolbox to Ram Disk and run it from there.

How can be possible? These WB3.1 disks are stored in the flash of ACA500+ .

[StingerHU]

Hm. Really strange. I just clicked a few times on the cancel button of this error and I was able to partitioning this flash card. Now I'm seeing all of them, formatting them and started the installation. What is caused this?

Here's the picture about the issue... http://i414.photobucket.com/albums/p...220_230400.jpg

[pgovotsos]

Originally Posted by StingerHU

I ran into a problem with ACA500 Plus.

You might want to go to the ACA500 plus thread and ask Jens. He might know a bit more about it than the rest of us

Here's that thread:

http://eab.abime.net/showthread.php?t=79303

[thomas]

Originally Posted by StingerHU

How can be possible? These WB3.1 disks are stored in the flash of ACA500+ .

Bad implementation of "disk from flash". Maybe the disks are mounted as read/write but write requests are ignored. Then verify will fail and cause the error message. Like I said, just don't attempt to write to the disks. You shouldn't write to the original disks anyway.

HDToolbox tries to save the "drive definitions" file to the disk it was run from. So either run HDToolbox from RAM or change "drive definitions" to "ram:drive definitions" before you save.

[pgovotsos]

Originally Posted by thomas

Bad implementation of "disk from flash". Maybe the disks are mounted as read/write but write requests are ignored. Then verify will fail and cause the error message. Like I said, just don't attempt to write to the disks. You shouldn't write to the original disks anyway.

HDToolbox tries to save the "drive definitions" file to the disk it was run from. So either run HDToolbox from RAM or change "drive definitions" to "ram:drive definitions" before you save.

Pardon me, butI'm not sure you're familiar with the ACA500 plus. Might want to look at the thread I posted above of go to Individual's website for a good description of how it works.

As StingerHU said, the 3.1 install files are in the flash rom of the ACA500 plus. You run the installer from the menu system of the accelerator and it installs 3.1 onto the CF card in the first slot. Floppy disks are not involved at all.

http://icomp.de/shop-icomp/en/shop/product/ACA500plus.html

The description is there. More information there than on the wiki.

[pgovotsos]

Originally Posted by StingerHU

How can be possible? These WB3.1 disks are stored in the flash of ACA500+ .

Have you updated the firmware and menus? There have been many updates to it. If you go to the thread I mentioned, you'll find links to the latest version. The one in the thread is usually newer than the version on the wiki.

Remember that the software in flash is still sort of beta. It's still pre 1.0, I think the latest version is 0.89

[thomas]

Originally Posted by pgovotsos

Floppy disks are not involved at all.

I never used the word "floppy", did I? You cannot have files without some kind of disk, real or virtual. And more important you cannot have a write error in block 880 without a disk with 1760 blocks, the size of a floppy disk or ADF file.

[StingerHU]

Originally Posted by pgovotsos

Have you updated the firmware and menus? There have been many updates to it. If you go to the thread I mentioned, you'll find links to the latest version. The one in the thread is usually newer than the version on the wiki.

Remember that the software in flash is still sort of beta. It's still pre 1.0, I think the latest version is 0.89

Not yet, I'm still using the original 1st week of January firmware on my ACA500+. Yesterday I've tried to flash with the latest version, but AUX port which basically able to read FAT32 CF's didn't saw the update file in root - even it's readeable on my computer.

Btw, I put this strange thing to ACA500+ topic - maybe Jens and the other "more-experienced" guys know more. Okay, I was able to partitionize, format and now use this CF with SFS but shouldn't get errors during critical processes, like this one.

[demolition]

The virtual floppies are stored as compressed images in flash, so they are not mounted directly from flash. Instead, they are extracted to fast mem so each image mounted will consume 880k of memory. Thus the images can safely be written to as much as you want, but any changes will be gone by next reboot.

Did you perhaps have any disk inserted which could have had some virus on it which wrote itself to the virtual install disk? If it is a completely plain config, then it seems odd and perhaps you have some bad memory or other hardware fault.

[StingerHU]

Did you perhaps have any disk inserted which could have had some virus on it which wrote itself to the virtual install disk? If it is a completely plain config, then it seems odd and perhaps you have some bad memory or other hardware fault.

I took out these two cards from the original package and fit into ACA500 immediately. I don't have floppy drive anymore on my A500, it's gotekized but at the moment it was blank without any usb. I used internal ACA500+ flash WB install to create a clean WB on my CF.

[demolition]

Then if you're using the latest ACA500plus menu software, I'd suspect you have some hardware problem.

[StingerHU]

Originally Posted by demolition

Then if you're using the latest ACA500plus menu software, I'd suspect you have some hardware problem.

General answer. No, as I said i'm using the first fw version 'cause I got my ACA500+ from the 1st batch and still not updated the software. I'll do it definiately 'cause it was a recommendation by Jens in the correspondible forum topic.

[pgovotsos]

Originally Posted by StingerHU

General answer. No, as I said i'm using the first fw version 'cause I got my ACA500+ from the 1st batch and still not updated the software. I'll do it definiately 'cause it was a recommendation by Jens in the correspondible forum topic.

Remember that to update the firmware and menu, you download them and then copy them to a CF card. For the firmware, if it's zipped, don't unzip it, just copy it as it is to the card - the update will do the unzip behind the scenes as it installs it.

Very important - when you go to put the CF card in the ACA500 plus, DON'T insert it in the boot slot, put it in the other one. You're not going to be booting from this card, it's just used more as a data disk with the update files on it.

You're not going to be booting to Workbench, just going to the ACA500 plus menu that comes up when you turn on the computer. When you go through the menus it will be looking for the files on the non bootable card in the second slot.