Having trouble mounting my PCMCIA CDROM

[NovaCoder]

I managed to land myself one of these http://home.iprimus.com.au/novacoder..._CDROM 004.jpg in the hope of loading OS3.9 and playing CD32 games (with music) on my 1200.


I’m hoping someone here has some experience with this particular unit (crosses fingers). As you can see from the pic, everything looks in really good nick considering the age and the seller was kind enough to include the install disk. It looks like the CDROM is a regular quad-speed PC drive.

This is what I’ve been trying so far.

1) Turn CDROM on (seems to power-up and eject fine).
2) Wack in a music CD rom (I don’t have any CD32 discs yet).
3) Push the PCMCIA card in all the way in and connect the cable.
4) Run the install program from the disc.

The install program runs all the way to the end and tries to ‘mount’ the CDROM under ‘CD0’, when I restart I’d hoped to see a new icon which represents the CD drive but instead I just get a ‘can’t find CDROM’ message.

There is also a dukebox program installed which reports 'can't find CDROM'.


When my PC is back up and running I’ll do some screen-grabs of the install process that will make it easier to see what’s going on.



PS. As most of you know I’m hopeless (e.g. took me 3 attempts to install WB3.1 properly).

[NovaCoder]

Don't all answer at once

I found this thread ->
http://www.amiga.org/modules/newbb/v...orumpost468780

Which helped a bit, managed to get rid of the error message on start-up. I ended up with the (I assume) correct icon installed under 'dosdrivers' called CD2. After clicking on the icon you get a message 'CD2 already mounted' but still no new icon on the desktop

I've now discovered that an 8mb memory card on a 1200 can cause PCMCIA issues so I'm going to try it again without the card to see if that makes any difference. Do you create issues by re-running install programs on the Amiga, or does it just overwrite what was done before?

Any other advice will be appreciated

[twizzle]

hi,
if this scsi cd works the same as the power computing scsi squirrel
you have to edit the CD0 icon tooltypes to either UNIT=2 OR 3
and the Device= to your device
and rename CDO to CD2 OR 3 aswell.

[Dimlow]

NovaCoder, I would be interested in your results of the 8mb memory and the pcmcia card test. Like i said in my post about my new(old) Blizzard 1230/50 MkII im now running 64Mb of ram in that ,and i have not experienced any problems with pcmcia conflicts. I used a network card and a Compact flash with no problems at all.

Gary

[NovaCoder]

Yep I think that the 8mb card was causing me issues. I've already edited the CD0 icon tooltypes to UNIT=2, will try it again this weekend (without the memory card).

The 8mb PCMCIA confict was a bit of a stuff up by Commodore wasn't it? What was the point in selling the 8mb cards if it wasn't going to work properly....no wonder my card had only 4mb installed when I brought it

[rkauer]

Originally Posted by NovaCoder

Yep I think that the 8mb card was causing me issues. I've already edited the CD0 icon tooltypes to UNIT=2, will try it again this weekend (without the memory card).

The 8mb PCMCIA confict was a bit of a stuff up by Commodore wasn't it? What was the point in selling the 8mb cards if it wasn't going to work properly....no wonder my card had only 4mb installed when I brought it

Not exactly an issue. It's more an option to make: your stock A1200/600 with 8Mb RAM or 4Mb and PCMCIA?

[NovaCoder]

Originally Posted by rkauer

Not exactly an issue. It's more an option to make: your stock A1200/600 with 8Mb RAM or 4Mb and PCMCIA?

I want both dagnamit!

Actually, I don't care as I'm getting a 030 but it's still a bit silly.

[rkauer]

Originally Posted by NovaCoder

I want both dagnamit!

Actually, I don't care as I'm getting a 030 but it's still a bit silly.

Since 1985, any stock Amiga is capable of taking up to 8Mb of fast RAM. For that era, it was an impressive feature. That RAM is in the autoconfig space area.

When the A600/1200 came, C= don't bother on modify this (for retro-compatibility). But it cause a lot of hassle for ppl who try to use the newest computer's features (PCMCIA, for example).

Those elder RAM expansions (and some old accelerators, too) can add up to 8Mb to system without extra logic, causing the problems we all know.

To solve this issue, only with newer accelerators who maps the extra RAM out of the 68000 (autoconfig) memory area.

[Jope]

Are you sure it's about retro compatibility? I'd reckon it's only because of the narrow address bus of the EC020..

Same 24 bits as a 68000. So I guess they reused the old memory map out of necessity. The area above the 8MB autoconfig ram is already quite full, so I guess they just ran out of space and plonked it after the 4MB mark. The A1200 was meant to be a low-cost home computer after all, with the "pro users" steered towards the A4000.

[NovaCoder]

I managed to get somewhere with this after wiping the drive and installing AmigaSys.

After installing the drivers that came with the drive I did (at last) get a cd icon on my desktop

The install software actually detected the CD Drive this time because it came up as UNIT 1 during the install.

Still not quite right though because if you click on the icon it says something like 'cannot play audio files' and if you try to get to it via the shell (:CD1) you get the message 'not a DOS disk' (I currently have a legit version of OS3.9 in the drive so I assume it should be able to read it ok?).

The drive and PMCIA card are obviously ok, must be my configs.

Anyone got any ideas

[NovaCoder]

*BUMP*

Come on peoples, I'm sure somebody on this board must be clever enough to work it out, it's so close I can smell it.

These are the know facts:

1) Driver install program runs through and assigns the drive to unit 1 and creates a new icon called CD1 in Storage/DosDrivers.
2) After manually mounting the drive with the OS3.9 CD inside it spins for a while and then adds a CDROM icon to the desktop called 'CD-DA'.
3) Double clicking the CDROM icon gets you a 'CDROM Handler Error' dialog with a 'Cannot perform play audio command!' message inside.
4) Opening a command shell and typing 'cd CD1:' results in a 'not a valid DOS disk' error message.

It looks like a standard PC IDE 4x CDROM inside the external case. The Driver disk is marked VOB Computersysteme Gmbh - PCMCIA Combo Controller.

[twizzle]

hi
is there not a readme file on the floppy disc ?

i would have thought that you would have at least had to put in the tooltypes
Activate=1
Device=your device eg:cd.device
UNIT=1
etc

or it wont know where to look?

mike

[TheCorfiot]

My Advice would be

As a starting point, use the CD0 file supplied by commodore with WB3.1 in the storage folder / floppy.
Alter the Tootype to reflect your PCMCIA device driver & unit number

Ensure you have CDFilesystem installed in the L directory

If this works you can upgrade the filesystem to cachecdfs from OS3.5 as this much better & reads multisession CD's (need cacheprefs from IDEFix97)

Sorry I can't be more help but I am unfamiliar with this PCMCIA interface.

TC

[rkauer]

xLen>pt Googlec

Originally Posted by TheCorfiot

My Advice would be

As a starting point, use the CD0 file supplied by commodore with WB3.1 in the storage folder / floppy.
Alter the Tootype to reflect your PCMCIA device driver & unit number

Ensure you have CDFilesystem installed in the L directory

If this works you can upgrade the filesystem to cachecdfs from OS3.5 as this much better & reads multisession CD's (need cacheprefs from IDEFix97)

Sorry I can't be more help but I am unfamiliar with this PCMCIA interface.

TC

My advice is: install IDEfix97 and let the program search for the CD itself. You'll be glad to do it.

[NovaCoder]

I'm now running OS3.9, doesn't this come with a version of IDEFIX? How do I get it to look for PCMCIA CDROM drives?

The readme that comes on the CDROM install disk is less than helpful

[rkauer]

Originally Posted by NovaCoder

I'm now running OS3.9, doesn't this come with a version of IDEFIX? How do I get it to look for PCMCIA CDROM drives?

The readme that comes on the install disk is less than helpful

Download the "alternative" version from Aminet.

[NovaCoder]

Finally got somewhere with this CDROM drive. After reading your replies (thanks guys) and finding this helpful link -> PCMCIA issues it dawned on me that OS3.9 doesn't load all of the CD drivers by default (eg CacheCDFS). I also realised that my CDROM is actually a scsi device, it even has a unit # selector switch on the back

So I installed CacheCDFS (using good old WINUAE), edited the CD1 (installed under storage/dosdrivers) and changed the device to the one for my card (vob_pcmcia.device). This time CD1 mounts ok, disk icon added to the desktop. Double clicking on the icon launches the built in OS3.9 cd player application which can correctly see the tracks of a music cd and play/stop/eject

The only trouble is that I still cannot do anything with a non-music cd (eg the OS3.9 disc). For example in the command shell if I type 'CD1:' I get 'not a dos disk in device CD1'

It seems that it thinks that all disks are audio cds? It labels the CD icon on the workbench as 'CD1:CDDA' which I assume means digital audio.

The prefs for CacheCDFS also open up ok now but I can't see anything in there that will help.

[NovaCoder]

This gets stranger and stranger. I decided to take the case off the CD drive last night to see if I had a terminator switch and found that although externally it looks like a SCSI drive (connectors, unit switcher) it is acutally an IDE CDROM connected directly to the SCSI connectors and the Unit switcher isn't connected to anything! I assume that someone has been playing around with it and has swapped the SCSI CDROM for a IDE one at some point? The other wierd thing is that it works (at least as a music player) in OS3.9 using the supplied driver...all very bizzare.

I'm taking along to the local Amiga club meet in a couple of weeks to see what they make of it

[rampartsagain]

nova coder are you still with cdrom problems i get my squirrel working if you are still going around with this pm me maybe i could help