Using a Compact Flash card on a600/a1200 PCMCIA

[solarmon]

Originally Posted by rabidgerry

Hi, hate to be one of them people who can't transfer files from pcmcia compact flash adapter to their amiga hard drive but I am unfortunately.

I got the fat95 3.18 in the L directory

I got compactflash device v1.32 in the devs directory

I got CF0 in the DevsDosdrivers Directory

I got a transcend 133x 8gb card formatted to fat32 and doesn't register at all

I got a no name 16gb card formatted to fat32 and it is detected but shows as NDOS

I have tried this with both cards, basically I went into diskpart in windows10 and shrunk the cleaned and created a new primary partion and shrunk down to 1gb and then formatted in fat32 and then fat and still I was unable to see the cards or just get ndos with the no namer.

Can anyone think of what I might be doing wrong? I was expecting the no name CF not to read at all, however it's the transcend that doesn't get picked up at all. And way at the start of this thread someone mentions that the transcend 133x 4gb card works, so I cannot think for the life of me what I've done wrong or why at least one card doesn't work via the pcmcia adapter.

Any ideas or help will be much appreciated.

Thanks

Try this guide:

https://exthema.io/category/cf/

There are also some changes you need to do in the startup-sequence for CardReset and CardPatch.

[rabidgerry]

Originally Posted by jlin_au

For amiga 1200 owners, having an 8 MB memory expansion card installed in the 1200's expansion slot will cause memory addressing conflicts with PCMCIA cards especially those for interfacing to CF cards.

This conflict is normal and is due to the second 4MB of ram on the 8MB memory expansion card being installed into the same address range as that also used by the installed PCMCIA card in the standard Amiga 24-bit address map.

To use a PCMCIA card in an Amiga 1200 in this case you must either uninstall the 8 MB memory expansion card from the expansion slot or reconfigure the card to operate in 4 MB mode instead of 8MB mode using the 8MB/4MB jumper available on many of these cards to resolve this known conflict.

Hi, thanks for the reply, I should have mentioned I have an ACA1233N-40 which is PCMCIA friendly. So I expect that this isn't the issue.

[rabidgerry]

Originally Posted by solarmon

Try this guide:

https://exthema.io/category/cf/

There are also some changes you need to do in the startup-sequence for CardReset and CardPatch.

Ok I will go through this guide. I should have said I have the reset line added to the startup sequence already. Before the Load WB line. ****EDIT**** That guide I followed originally so done all of that as described.

[solarmon]

Originally Posted by rabidgerry

Ok I will go through this guide. I should have said I have the reset line added to the startup sequence already. Before the Load WB line. ****EDIT**** That guide I followed originally so done all of that as described.

How did you get the cfd and fat95 files to the Amiga in the first place? Did you extract the .lha file on the Amiga (physical or WinUAE) or on a PC/MAC OS?

Sometimes you can get corruption if you extract .lha files on a PC/MAC OS.

[rabidgerry]

Originally Posted by solarmon

How did you get the cfd and fat95 files to the Amiga in the first place? Did you extract the .lha file on the Amiga (physical or WinUAE) or on a PC/MAC OS?

Sometimes you can get corruption if you extract .lha files on a PC/MAC OS.

I opened up winuae, and loaded my CF hdd in the configuration I saved from when I originally created the hard drive with classic WB on there. Within this I have a directory mapped to the pc. So I just copied the .lha files to this directory, then moved them over to the hdd. Then when I took it back to the amiga and loaded it up I extracted the files from where I had moved them to in winuae. I noticed my HDD already had compact flash device and fat95. I just copied over them though.

Do you think I corrupted the files in winuae possibly?

[solarmon]

Originally Posted by rabidgerry

I opened up winuae, and loaded my CF hdd in the configuration I saved from when I originally created the hard drive with classic WB on there. Within this I have a directory mapped to the pc. So I just copied the .lha files to this directory, then moved them over to the hdd. Then when I took it back to the amiga and loaded it up I extracted the files from where I had moved them to in winuae. I noticed my HDD already had compact flash device and fat95. I just copied over them though.

Do you think I corrupted the files in winuae possibly?

It is generally safer to extract LHA files on the Amiga - in hardware or in WinUAE.

The only other corruption that could have occurred was during download. So, might be worth re-downloading again.

But you could also check the CRC of the extracted files - Aminet does list the contents of the LHA file with the CRC for it.

[solarmon]

Oh, I noticed that you have used CFD v1.32 but latest is CFD v1.33:

http://aminet.net/driver/media/CFD133.lha

Might be worth updating to use the latest version.

[rabidgerry]

ok let me try that 1.33 version.

So I will download. Open my HDD in winua. Move the file across to the HDD from pc directory within winuae, then take it to the Amiga and extract from there.

Forgive my ignorance, what is CRC of extracted files?

[solarmon]

Originally Posted by rabidgerry

Forgive my ignorance, what is CRC of extracted files?

CRC is a checksum of the file - basically a signature. If the checksum signature is different after download/extraction then you know that the file has either been corrupted or has been (maliciously) tampered with.

It is a way to make sure you have what you think you have.

I haven't had to use it myself on the Amiga, so I can't offer advice on exactly how to do it, but you'll need a CRC checksum tool/program on the Amiga to verify the checksum of the extracted file.

[rabidgerry]

Installed CFD v1.33. Still nothing other than one CF card showing as NDOS and the other not showing at all. I will probably give up on this pretty soon. I don't feel there is anything more to try other than buy another card.

[solarmon]

It might not be the CF card itself. What CF PCMCIA adapter do you have? Post some pictures of it.

[rabidgerry]

Ok have been fooling about today making another CF HDD and I constantly seemed to get errors when it came to transferring files from the HDF of classic workbench onto the formatted partitions of the CF card. Well it suddenly dawned on me it could be the usb CF/SD adapter I was using. So I was about to give up on the cheapo no name 16gb card when I decided one last shot at transferring the OS onto the card in the partition I had created for it. Well it worked first time around and it seems to be transferring files no problem.

The point?

I'm starting to thing the crappier adapter could possibly have corrupt files on the way over to the Amiga. I know I extracted them on the Amiga, but it might be worth another shot doing it all from scratch.

The PCMCIA adapter I have I bought from retro kit.

see here

https://www.retrobench.com/shop/pcmc...-flash-adaptor

[rabidgerry]

So the cheapo no name card that showed up as NDOS in the pcmcia slot I turned it into another HDD using classic workbench. Then the very next day another CF card I had ordered arrived. The brand is "My Memory". I plugged it into the cf-pcmcia adapter and it appeared on the desktop first time round without any issue. Classic work bench already has compactflash.device v1.27 installed as well as fat95 and card patch and card reset. After much file transferring I decided to upgrade the compactflash.device to v1.33 and fat95 was already 3.18. So I can't see what the issue was with the Transcend x133 8gb card but this "My Memory" 8gb card works perfectly. I shall add it to the list of CF compatibility thread.

[solarmon]

Have you, or are you able to, check the voltage getting to the PCMCIA slot and CF card?

CF cards can operate at either 3.3V or 5V but I assume there is a plus/minus 5/10/whatever percent threshold that may differ between brands/models?

So if the voltage is outside of the threshold a CF operates at then it will not work.

[rabidgerry]

I probably could check the voltage with a multimeter. But I would need to know what pins are what.

[solarmon]

Originally Posted by rabidgerry

I probably could check the voltage with a multimeter. But I would need to know what pins are what.

The following are perfect for that:

http://www.amigapcb.org/

https://www.amigawiki.org/doku.php?i...ice:schematics

[lesta_smsc]

Sorry to bump the thread, but I am unable to get CF to be detected on my A600. One is generic and the other is Transcend. If I go into "Prepcard" I can see both cards will get detected but despite them being configured correctly (WinUAE boots both), I cannot seem to get the A600 to 'show' them on WB.

The A600 has an internal IDE to SD adaptor - is there a known incompatibility with using such an interface and PCMCIA CF?

I have tried the latest CFD/FAT95 and it has all been configured correctly but despite this, I am not sure why the CF is not showing on WB.

This is the PCMCIA to CF adaptor I am using:

https://img.sunsky-online.com/upload...S-PCD-2018.jpg

Any suggestions more than welcome... although I'm beginning to wonder whether the PCMCIA to CF adaptor is to blame? If so, why will it detect correctly in Prepcard?

[Nightshft]

The Adapter:
should be fine. AFAIK it just connects directly through.

Card Filesystem:
I don't know about prepcard.
The CF card should be formatted FAT (IIRC its FAT and not FAT32), which you can do on the PC.

Drivers:
and on the Amiga you need compactflash.device and the fat95 file system.
Back then I bought a Transfer Disk on ebay (because of the chicken-egg problem) and it worked instantly. I think CFD133 on Aminet looks good (which you said you use).

Trying it out:
IF it works it can be hotplugged. Which means you can boot to Workbench and plug in the card and it should appear in less than 2 seconds. Like any drive or disk.

Good luck!

Edit: I don't know of any incompatibilities with an internal adapter.
Do you have an Accelerator or Mem Expansion? The Memory area from 4 to 8 MB clashes with the PCMCIA Adress space on many cards.

[solarmon]

Originally Posted by lesta_smsc

Sorry to bump the thread, but I am unable to get CF to be detected on my A600. One is generic and the other is Transcend. If I go into "Prepcard" I can see both cards will get detected but despite them being configured correctly (WinUAE boots both), I cannot seem to get the A600 to 'show' them on WB.

The A600 has an internal IDE to SD adaptor - is there a known incompatibility with using such an interface and PCMCIA CF?

I have tried the latest CFD/FAT95 and it has all been configured correctly but despite this, I am not sure why the CF is not showing on WB.

This is the PCMCIA to CF adaptor I am using:

https://img.sunsky-online.com/upload...S-PCD-2018.jpg

Any suggestions more than welcome... although I'm beginning to wonder whether the PCMCIA to CF adaptor is to blame? If so, why will it detect correctly in Prepcard?

The PCMCIA slot used with a Compact Flash card is typically used a removable mass storage device, in addition to, and not as, a normal and bootable Amiga drive.

The Compact Flash card should be formatted in FAT16 or FAT32. This is what the FAT95 drivers is for, to be able to read the FAT format.

The PCMCIA to CF adapter itself should be passive and should not contain any active components - it should just map the pins from PCMCIA to CF.

The CF card may/typically operate at 3.3V or 5V. It could be that it is receiving a low 5V supply and trying to operate at 3.3V, which the Amiga does not work at.

So check the 5V supply going to the PCMCIA slot.

And depending on what memory expansion / accelerator card you have, 8MB will clash with the PCMCIA memory address range.

[lesta_smsc]

I have a 1MB trapdoor RAM so a total of 2MB.

The card is a known compatible brand.

I've got a CF boot disk and even this is unable to get CF working.

It does see the card plugged in and out via the prepcard tool so I know it's being detected. Info command also reveals CF0: No disk present. This is regardless of whether the adaptor and/or card is connected.

I was under impression that a boot disk would override any settings currently present in my own internal SD card?

Something is missing that is stopping the card 'activating'. May have to try without RAM extension although I'd be surprised if the original A601 would conflict?