Pcmcia adapter not working?

[jazzyalba2108]

hey guys, I have recently purchased a PCMCIA adapter from AmigaKIT, however, its not working and have spoken to amigakit and the guy belives its a motherboard fault. this is a refurbished A600 and I don't know what to do or what advice you guys could help with. also I have tried formatting an internal CF card, but anything above 1gb, keeps getting dos error?

very frustrated please help!!!

[Matt_H]

What is your kickstart version? Anything below 3.1 (v40.63) could be problematic with the PCMCIA port and internal IDE. Are the PCMCIA pins undamaged?

Do you know who did the refurbishment of your machine? My point being, anyone can put an Amiga on eBay, clean the case, and call it "refurbished", so unless a skilled technician worked actually on the motherboard there could indeed be a fault.

[jazzyalba2108]

hey thanks for the reply. its wb 2.1 with kickstart 37.350, although the amigakit guy was of the opinion that shouldn't be an issue. the pins are ok I did check when speaking with said amigakit.

I did not purchase of evilbay, never would, learnt my lessons!!! it was actually from a amiga forum on fb, the guy seemed very genuine and even he seems surprised about these issues!

Without physically seeing the card adapter I would agree with software or perhaps firmware.

On the other hand these driver cards have protected outputs and inputs and those components are like fuses, it is a possibility the inputs or outputs are blown.

Was there any other device driver installed to use the pcmia slot?

The 1 gig clip on DOS, is your hard drive or device properly partitioned? Or jumped right.

[alexh]

Internal IDE did you set the "Max Transfer" value correctly when partioning?

[FOL]

Please bare in mind, I have deliberately setup a test mock up with exactly the same setup (not sure on motherboard, as its not known at this time).

Same adapter, same card. Run exactly the same way etc etc. Works here on test setup fine. The adapter and sandisk card were also tested here on same A600 used for testing and worked perfectly fine.

This is the first time in 9 years, I have seen a CF card not work on an A600 from the ones we sell (even after testing it on A600, just to be sure before shipping).

I have not said the board is faulty. Just it may have some odd compatability issue. Maybe due to the rev board. Without having it here to test and check things, we are left to run whats been learnt over the years and try and communicate it. This doesn't always work effectively.

Last thing I did say to try, was to remove HDD and run it from floppy. That takes HDD partition issues out of the equation.

[ppill]

More info would be useful. Is this a stock a600? What sort of drivers came on that disk? How do you mount the the CF drive?

[FOL]

Originally Posted by ppill

More info would be useful. Is this a stock a600? What sort of drivers came on that disk? How do you mount the the CF drive?

Its a Stock A600. Hes using EasyADF with the latest compactflash drivers and EasyADF boot disk mounts it.

His machine is mounting PCMCIA adapter and it sees there is a CF card there. It just says its 0kb when you go to format.

[sean_sk]

Could it be his Gayle chip has a problem? He did mention he also had a problem with his internal compact flash card.

[alexh]

Go back a version on CFD? 1.25 is available on Aminet which pre-dates all this stuff to make it ROM'able

[FOL]

Originally Posted by alexh

Go back a version on CFD? 1.25 is available on Aminet which pre-dates all this stuff to make it ROM'able

Could be worth a shot, however he has got no way transfer files to Amiga.

Originally Posted by sean_skroht

Could it be his Gayle chip has a problem? He did mention he also had a problem with his internal compact flash card.

This could be the way his CF HDD is setup or it could have errors on CF HDD.
Knowing the version of board would help. As we can then rule out if it is a rev issue.

Something that has not been mentioned. If I used KS3.1 in testing. CF showed up as CF0:NDOS. If using KS2.05 in testing. CF would not show up, had to go into Format and then select it (it did however show correct CF card size). Once formatted it, showed up fine.
Now when jazzyalba2108 did exactly the same (while talked through on phone), he always got 0kb in Format.

[alexh]

Did AmigaKit supply the CF card? If not then that has to be the first thing to change. It's probably broken or fake

[jazzyalba2108]

hey guys, yes the problem with the internal CF CARD, is that when I did it on WINUAE it worked, I followed several youtube vids and installed Classic WB 3.1, but this was unstable and nothing really worked, especially WHDLOAD! when I reinstalled WB 2.1, it formats the system partition of 200MB, then I formatted the WORK partition for 500MB, again no problem, then when I did GAMES partition of over 1.5GB, failed to format properly, NON DOS DISK!! I did it again and also did the MAX transfer and once again the SYSTEM 200MB fine, but this time I changed the WORK partition to 1.7GB and 1.8GB for the GAMES, same thing NON DOS DISK. so I am at a loss, it seems when you partition a drive over 1GB it fails?

[jazzyalba2108]

yes i purchased off AMIGAKIT, however i have tried several CF CARDS, all do the same, as in don't work!

[jazzyalba2108]

Was there any other device driver installed to use the pcmia slot? No i have only used it for said Adapter

The 1 gig clip on DOS, is your hard drive or device properly partitioned? Or jumped right. it was a IDE CF CARD ADAPTER, which was installed internally, also as stated when i formatted said card in WINUAE it worked.

[FOL]

Originally Posted by jazzyalba2108

Was there any other device driver installed to use the pcmia slot? No i have only used it for said Adapter

The 1 gig clip on DOS, is your hard drive or device properly partitioned? Or jumped right. it was a IDE CF CARD ADAPTER, which was installed internally, also as stated when i formatted said card in WINUAE it worked.

The problem is. Your proberly not emulating a real setup in WinUAE. As in, your proberly using the uaehf.device, which will work fine. If you emulated your exact hardware setup, I would bet you will get same issue.

We are talking about two different issues here. Remove the CF HDD comepletely and concentrate on the first issue, the PCMCIA slot. Then concentrate on CF HDD issue.

[jazzyalba2108]

hey guys it still not working? any ideas? either CF card cannot put games onto the IDE CF CARD nor can use PCMCIA

[jazzyalba2108]

guys you are not helping myself. I have paid money for nothing, it isn't working properly. amigakit is supposed to be good? nobody is helping, my PCMCIA adapter isn't working at all! please can somebody get this working. I have paid good money, firstly for the adapter, then for the assured CF CARD which amigakit promised would work! if anybody calls me a douche bag, that would show the mentality of the users. now behave yourself and do as I bid please. THIS IS THE SECOND TIME I HAVE HAD TO COMMUNICATE!!!

[FOL]

Originally Posted by jazzyalba2108

guys you are not helping myself. I have paid money for nothing, it isn't working properly. amigakit is supposed to be good? nobody is helping, my PCMCIA adapter isn't working at all! please can somebody get this working. I have paid good money, firstly for the adapter, then for the assured CF CARD which amigakit promised would work! if anybody calls me a douche bag, that would show the mentality of the users. now behave yourself and do as I bid please. THIS IS THE SECOND TIME I HAVE HAD TO COMMUNICATE!!!

I have spent alot of time on the phone with you, going through different things, trying to find a solution. I even spent time, setting up an exact same vanilla A600 setup as you had (including Kickstart ROM) and tested. Everything worked, both the adapter and card you have were tested on the same test setup. I even tested lots of adapters and 4GB CF cards in an effort to reproduce your issue, yet they all worked fine.

The last communication from you, was you were considering sending A600 to us to check and test. See if there was any issue with the board, that would cause this.

[Amiga1992]

Just refund this dude and get it over with, he can then get a new kit from somewhere else, and confirm/not confirm his A600 is to fault.