Problems setting up a 16 Gb CF card from Winuae

[beltrixx]

Hi,

I've tried unsuccessfully to configure a 16 Gb Transcend 133x CF Card which I thought to be fully compatible with my miggy, as described in other posts...

Mi idea was to first set it up and format it with PFS3 from within WinUAE and install it inside my real A1200 later, but it has been impossible...

I've used diskpart under win7 to clean any partitions (card was FAT32 formated by default) and added the CF card as hard drive, using device IDE0 in Winuae.

I've encountered some problems :

1) When using Hdinsttools, only 8 Gb out of 16 Gb are recognized. I tried to set it up with PFS3 (Loaded a directory with some utils and included PFS3 in winuae) but only partitions formated with FFS International are shown once Workbench has started...

I think it probably has to do with the 8 Gb size limit stated on the sticky post. So, how could I patch the scsi.device (or change the default scsi.device by a patched one) under winaue to recognize the size of my CF card correctly??

2) In my real A1200 I have a powerflyer (Fast ATA controller). I remember that the powerflyer controller automatically splitted a hard drive into 4 Gb partitions to ensure compatibility, but first it should be formatted... Which steps should I follow if I decide to try to set it up under my real Amiga?

Please, I really need some advice to get this done ...

Thanks a lot and kind regards,

Manel.

[beltrixx]

Hi,

I've been reading the sticky post "CF / SD and large drives FAQ" a bit more thoroughly...

It seems that you must use a scsi.device version >= 43.34 (Os 3.5) to avoid the 8 Gb size limitation, right? so in order to be able to format my CF card I could use a WinUAE .hdf image file with OS 3.9 installed -I think I've got one elsewhere-, Boot from it and load a "utility" dir containing previously downloaded utils such as PFS3, hdinsttool and such.

This image should include a scsi.device providing support for CF Cards > 8Gb. I could use hdinsttool / hdtoolbox to format and partition the CF Card with PFS3.

By the way, I intend to prep the partitions using PFS3-DS filesystem with these settings :

Identifier/Dos Type for PFS3DS: 0x50445303 or PDS\3
(I think I read somewhere that it really meant no difference as PFS didn't care about this identifier. Am I right?)
Mask: 0xffffffc
Buffers: 250
Maxtransfer: 0x1fe00

My idea is to create four partitions on the card, each one below the 4Gb size limit, so it would be possible to boot from it from a non-patched system if needed though my real Amiga has a Fast ATA controller that should provide support for this card (my actual HD Drive is 20 Gb, 2.5" formatted with SFS).

Any corrections or advices would be appreciated

Kind regards,

Manel.

[Solo761]

If you're using ClassicWB there patched scsi.device files with it. If you copy it to dh0evs (and rename to scsi.device, default name is A1200.scsi.device if I remember correctly) it will be automatically loaded when you boot the Amiga.

If you use vanilla WB you can use scsi.device from ClassicWB (or some other source) and load it manually with LoadModule from Aminet. That's how CWB loads it anyway.

I'm not sure if you can even partition HDD/CF that big without patch scsi.device. But even if you are, HDInstTools are not going to show correct size, but it's only visual, it can't display numbers so big. There are patched HDInstTools versions that fix this but it's not really important, it's not used so often .

When you load patched scsi.device you'll probably solve your problems.




P.S.

While displayed GB value is wrong, cylinder, head, block is what is really important, and they should be correct. I use these values when I partition new drives. It's more precise this way. This is the math behind cylinder to bytes (and back)

Cylinders * Heads * Sectors = total number of blocks a.k.a. highest logical block address (LBA)
Cylinders * Heads * Sectors * 512 = size of the disk in bytes (512 is sector size in bytes)
Blocks per Track = Sectors
Tracks per Cylinder = Heads
Blocks per Cylinder = Sectors * Heads
Cylinders * Blocks per Cylinder = total number of blocks on the drive

I also have 16 GB CF card (coincidentally also transcend ) and these are the numbers

Cylinders 31045
Heads 16
Blocks per Track 63
Blocks per Cylinder 1008


So, to convert this to bytes you should do this

bytes = cylinders * heads * blocks * 512 = 31045 * 16 * 63 * 512 = 16022200320 B

to get value in megabytes this value should be divided by 1024 twice, first division gets you kilobytes, and second megabytes.

MB = (bytes / 1024) / 1024 = 15279,96094 MB

next, lets say that first partition (DH0) will be 500 MB in size, first we have to get back from MB to B,

500 MB = 500 * 1024 * 1024 = 524288000 B

Next to get how many cylinders this is we should do first calculation from above in reverse

cylinders = bytes / (heads * blocks * 512) = 524288000 / (16 * 63 * 512) = 1015,873

from what I saw in practice it should be rounded down so

cylinders = 1015

First partition begins at cylinder 2, our partition is 1015 cylinders big so end cylinder should be beginning cylinder + size in cylinders, 2 + 1015

start cylinder: 2
end cylinder: 1017

And all of this trouble will make partition with the size of 500 MB . If you create new partition after this one it will automatically take up the whole space, you can check start and end cylinders to be 1018 (end cylinder of previous partition + 1) and the rest of the space which is 31045.

Or you can add some more partition using the same calculations as above. Let's say you want DH1 as 750 MB partition, calculation would say 750 MB equals 1523 cylinders so that would make 1018 start cylinder and 2541 end cylinder, and third partition, DH2, would be from cylinder 2542 to 31045, or 28504 cylinders long which would make it 14029 MB in size.

To help myself I made excel table that calculates all of this .

I partition my CF card as 500MB DH0 with FFS, and DH1 is the rest of it (14779 MB) as PFS3.

[Solo761]

Originally Posted by beltrixx

My idea is to create four partitions on the card, each one below the 4Gb size limit, so it would be possible to boot from it from a non-patched system if needed though my real Amiga has a Fast ATA controller that should provide support for this card (my actual HD Drive is 20 Gb, 2.5" formatted with SFS).

Any corrections or advices would be appreciated

Kind regards,

Manel.

If you're going to use 3.9 WB there shouldn't be any problems with it's HDInstTools displaying wrong size of the drive so you can disregard all that math trivia .

I'm not sure about the limit, I think that if you plug it in non-patched system only first 8GB and only if you use, as they say, modern filesystem, like PFS3. Or combination, boot partition below 4GB with FFS, and rest PFS3. I think that would also make them usable on non patched system.

But then again, if you set it so that it automatically loads patched scsi.device via LoadModule on boot time it will work whole on every system because what you actually patch is OS, not the hardware .

[thomas]

Originally Posted by beltrixx

My idea is to create four partitions on the card, each one below the 4Gb size limit, so it would be possible to boot from it from a non-patched system if needed

Please note that the 4GB limit is a hard drive size limit, not a partition size limit.

If you want to create four boot partitions, they must all be in the first 4GB of the drive, not exeeding 4GB in sum.

0------------------------------4GB-------------------------------------------------16GB
<---boot partitions here---><---- no boot partitions here! --------------------->

[fgh]

Hi there,

WinUAE doesn't need a patched scsi.device to work with larger drives. Even if you use IDE0, WinUAE uses drive size provided by windows.
Guess I should add that to the FAQ..

And are you sure it is actually only showing 8GB?
Not sure about HDInstTools, but with a 16GB card in WinUAE, HDToolbox's partition page will show up with what seems like two ~4GB partiions. But expand or contract the partitions a bit and you'll notice that in fact it is two ~8GB partitions mislabeled as ~4GB.
This is the bug Solo761 mentioned: HDToolbox cannot display numbers larger than 4GB (32bit) so when you extend a partition larger than 4GB the displayed size resets to zero.
The partition will work correctly, though, but for really large partitions you need to keep track of how many times it resets.
Entering the values manually, both for drive and partition definitions is of course the 'proper' way to do it

Originally Posted by beltrixx

(I think I read somewhere that it really meant no difference as PFS didn't care about this identifier. Am I right?)

The All-in-One version of PFS3 that Toni Wilen created (PFS3AiO) knows NSD, TD64 and DirectSCSI, and tries them in that order, but if you specify PDS/3 it will try DS first.
With the older official PFS3 the identifiers matter as far as I recall.

[beltrixx]

Thanks everybody for your answers. I've really learnt a lot through reading them

I'll try to apply some of the solutions advised as soon as I can, and will let you know if I finally got it working

Kind regards,

Manel.

[beltrixx]

Hi again,

Yesterday I partitioned my 16 Gb CF card but I'm not sure if I managed to did it successfully. Let me explain a bit :

I started a preconfigured OS 3.9 setup from WinUAE and set it up to use a specific directory on my laptop as a "work2" assign.

I had to use the uaehf.device to allow winuae configuration to start properly (don't know if this is correct) and executed "fixhddsize" utility from the previous assign. This utility showed the card had being detected as 8 Gb and offered to double the size up to 14,9 Gb.

After that, I used HDToolBox version shipped with OS 3.9 and managed to create 4 partitions on the card and, as it was a bit late, I decided that I would format the partitions today.

I'm a bit worried about the process because :

Once I added PFS3ds-020 filesystem in HDToolbox, it recognized it as custom (0x43465300) and neither did offer me the chance to
change the identifier to somewhat else (PDS/3 for instance) nor choose any buffers (the option no longer exists ??? I read that it
had to be set up to 250).

I did set up Mask to 0xffffffc and max Transfer to 0x1fe00. I read these where the correct settings for PFS3 on other threads...

My doubts are :

1) Do you think I have partitioned the card correctly? or should I use hdinsttool instead of HDToolbox to repartition the card?

2) Once formatted through the format command delivered with PFS3, I will copy "Amikit for Real Amiga" distro over the
first (bootable) partition. I suppose I need to include the
PFS3ds-020 filesystem...do I have only to copy it to L: or there's something more that needs to be done?

3) Once step 2 is completed, I understand the card should be ready to plug into my real A1200 ide to CF card adapter (which will
also be attached to the primary controller of my Fast ATA) and should be bootable. Am I right?

Attached you'll find a screen grab from HDToolbox, with the CF card formatted...

Thanks in advance and kind regards,

Manel.

[fitzsteve]

You have already used the best HDToolBox, that of OS3.9 should already give you the correct partition sizes and therefore what you have done should be OK.

If you have not changed the identifier it's not a big problem, don't worry.

You do not need to put the file system in L unless you want to use it later for setting up other drives connected to your Amiga it's useful to have the file system somewhere on he drive.

If configured correctly the file system is stored inside the RDB of your drive.

My only observation is the boot partition is very big, not normally a problem but I recommend smaller sizes like 250mb. Since you use PFS3 it's OK to have larger partitions later in the drive like 10gb if you want to fill it with the full pack of WHDLoad Games for example.

Lastly if you want to use this drive in a real Amiga you would need to use a patched scsi.device, OS3.9 BB2 does this by default although in my experience it can conflict with some CF media.

[Solo761]

2) You don't have to include filesystem, it's "installed" on HDD, it's used only when you partition new hard drive. You can include it, no big deal, if at some later point in time you're going to prep another CF it will be handy to have it.

One more thing, I see you're using PFS3 5.3, there's also newer PFS3 All-in-one, that's the one I used on my CF. Someone more knowledgeable can say which one is actually better.

I can't say about point 1 and 3, I never had that kind of setup.