new user struggling

[minke]

Ok, I have an A1200, which I upgraded with a 32meg 40mhz accelerator and 4gb cf card as HD and kickstart 3.1
I have amiga forever 2014 on my pc - so I have winuae and roms
Card has a registered whdload 17.0 installed, along with other stuff I put on there, such as grabkick, relokick, dopus and disksalv.

Now I've been at this for a few weeks now and struggling to get games transferred onto my hard drive. I open winuae, check my rom is ok, add fast ram, add the cf card as a HD and select the games file folder (where I have 120 ish whdload games) - labelling it as stuff. Everything boots up.

Now this is where it all goes wrong. I really don't understand amigados commands, despite my best efforts, but the only command that works for me is
cd stuff:
lha e -x <name>.lha

This extracts the game in my 'stuff' file and want it to sit in DH1 - that is the first problem. The second is that when I drag the file out of games straight into DH1 it takes around 7-8 minutes and corrupts everything -that is the DH1 file becomes unreadable, or suddenly becomes NDOS, or corrupts workbench, it just messes things up.

I have swopped the card between my pc card reader so many times now, something is gonna break. I do this because my A1200 reads the card way better than winuae does and will actually let me format the partitions.

I am clearly doing something wrong and very close to selling up. I just want to play some games, how can it be so hard?

[jbenam]

I don't have my Amiga near me at the moment, but IIRC you just need to do

lha e <name>.lha DH1:

And it'll extract the lha in DH1 directly.

The corruption issue is because of MaxTransfer. Did you set it up correctly as 0x1fe00 when setting up the drives?

For more through explanation of the MaxTransfer issue look here: http://eab.abime.net/showthread.php?t=61666

After you solve the MaxTransfer issue everything should just work. Don't give it up now!

[minke]

Thanks for that, my google-fu has let me down there. I didn't realise this max transfer was the problem. I'll look this up now

cool, went into hdtoolbox and one partition was 0x1fe00 and another was 0xfffff or something like that. Time to get started again. many thanks.

[minke]

well, it looks like something more serious is going on. Tried a few times and after a few games are transferred, winuae locks up. Currently the state of play is that the DH1 partition has vanished and when I open hdtools, everything is greyed out. I also cannot re format DH1, it all just locks up.

I strongly suspect that it is an issue with winuae. When I replace the card in my A1200 I can access, repartition and reformat again.

[amiman99]

If you want to transfer your games to the real A1200 then I would recommend for you to do this way:

1. Install Compact flash driver on your A1200
2. format you Cf card to FAT16 / 32
3. Copy your LHA files to the card
4. Using the PCMCIA adapter insert the CF card into A1200
5. If drivers are correctly installed, CF icon should show up on desktop.
6. Open the CF card drawer
7. Do show all files
8. You got plenty of RAM, so we can decompress the files to RAM:
9. Double click on the LHA file and in the Execute command window type:
LHA x -x filename.lha RAM:
10. Your files should be in RAM: disk, copy then to your HD.

Instead RAM: you could do DH0: if you want.

This ALWAYS works for me.
I don't use WinUAE to transfer any files, just do it directly.

[Arnie]

It may be the Card reader on the PC.

[minke]

Thanks for all the replies, got another cf card, pcmcia adaptor and another card reader just in case. I've loaded the cfd.lha and fat95.lha files, so I'm ready for trying again. Just gotta wait for stuff to arrive

[jbenam]

Originally Posted by minke

well, it looks like something more serious is going on. Tried a few times and after a few games are transferred, winuae locks up. Currently the state of play is that the DH1 partition has vanished and when I open hdtools, everything is greyed out. I also cannot re format DH1, it all just locks up.

I strongly suspect that it is an issue with winuae. When I replace the card in my A1200 I can access, repartition and reformat again.

With transferred you mean extracted from their LHAs?

If so, you might want to just move over the LHAs and then extract them directly on your Amiga, just to see if it still happens.

I suspect the Card Reader in the PC as well...

[minke]

I'm guessing I've not set my drivers up correctly. The pcmcia card is in, with the .lha files on the card. Nothing is showing up.

[fitzsteve]

Originally Posted by minke

I'm guessing I've not set my drivers up correctly. The pcmcia card is in, with the .lha files on the card. Nothing is showing up.

You need to extract the files from within the lha, they're like a zip file but for Amiga; see:

http://guide.abime.net/wb3.1/chaplha.htm

[minke]

Apologies, I wasn't being clear enough. I have formatted the card on pc, as for the drivers, they are already installed on my 1200 hd
Fat95 is already in L
compactflash.device is in devs
cf0 is in dosdrivers (also in storage, tried both)

nothing is showing up, It is the same type/brand cf card as my hd

[fitzsteve]

Which brand is it? Some don't work in PCMCIA.

You can try other versions of CFD there are a least 4 versions floating about (I'm sure I linked them in another thread recently)

But I think then you have a chicken & egg scenario.

[modrobert]

On my A1200 with WB 3.1 I have to mount the CF card (attached to adapter) in the PCMCIA slot using this command in an Amiga shell:

mount CF0:

After that the workbench icon shows up.

[minke]

Tried mount cf0: earlier. It says its already mounted. In have tried updating compactflash.device and that is v1.32. Gonna try to reformat card again

[fitzsteve]

As I said some brands of CF just don't work in PCMCIA, which brand of CF is it?

[minke]

4gb transcend x133. Its supposed to work

[amiman99]

Does the icon for the CFCARD shows up on the desktop?
And if it does, you open it and you don't see any files? Is that correct?
If it is, then you need to do "View All Files" from the menu.
Then you can see all your LHA files.

[jbenam]

Are you 100% sure that the CF you put in the PCMCIA adapter is formatted in FAT32/16?

[minke]

There is no desktop icon at all. The card is formatted in fat32 and tried different allocation sizes

[fitzsteve]

Originally Posted by minke

There is no desktop icon at all. The card is formatted in fat32 and tried different allocation sizes

I've never tried a Transcend one in PCMCIA myself. I'd recommend a Sandisk one, these have always worked for me.