Amiga Harddisk not recognized by WinUAE

Hi everyone,

WinUAE and this great forum have started my interest in my old Amiga 600 again. To transfer some programs from the PC (WinXP, SP2) to my Amiga, I connected the harddisk of my Amiga (a 120MB Conner CP2124) via a "USB to IDE"-interface to my PC. Here my problems started:

The harddisk is not shown in the Windows Explorer or in the system management console and WinUAE does not show it under "Add Harddrive". Starting WinUAE with option -disableharddrivesafetycheck gives the same result. winuaebootlog.txt always states the following:

opening device '\\?\usbstor#disk&ven_generic&prod_usb_disk&rev_9.02#6&318aa8e7&0#{53f56307-b6bf-11d0-94f2-00a0c91efb8b}'
device id string: 'Generic  USB Disk         9.02'
BytesPerSector=512 Cyls=4294967295 TracksPerCyl=1 SecsPerTrack=1
device size 0 (0x0) bytes
IOCTL_DISK_GET_DRIVE_LAYOUT failed with error code21.

So it seems that the drive parameters are transferred incorrectly, since the harddrive works perfectly in my A600 (KS 37.300). I've tried all possible jumper settings on the harddrive, but the result was always as above.

Does anybody here have any ideas what I could do to get my harddrive working in WinUAE? Thanks for your time!

[Toni Wilen]

Cyls value is bogus (-1 in signed format). Looks like another case of crappy USB adapter. Some work, some don't, reason unknown.

2.5" -> 3.5" IDE adapters work 100%.

Thanks for your quick answer, Toni!

I will try it with a 2,5" to 3,5" adapter.

[Toni Wilen]

Originally Posted by Toni Wilen

2.5" -> 3.5" IDE adapters work 100%.

btw, some really old drives can have firmware bugs. If bios fail to detect the drive with 2.5"->3.5" adapter, try forcing transfer mode to PIO1 or PIO0.

Perhaps most USB adapters require DMA? Most old and small IDE drives are PIO-only (or had buggy DMA support) This could explain USB problems.