Compact Flash crazy

[Toryglen-boy]

howdy.

Looking for some tips from some Amiganauts, i used to know the system, some many years ago. not now

Trying to setup a CF card with IDE adaptor blah, blah, on an A600 with 37.350 and WB 2,05.

I plug the 2Gb Transcend card into the reader, build an Amiga, same roms etc in WinUAE, partition the drive, set it up etc. all goes sweet as a nut. i then plugged it into the A600, HDToolbox has a message like "driver not installed", and it can't see anything, all buttons are masked out. the drive was cleaned with diskpart, before setting up in UAE, it worked fine in there, i remembered something about tool types for HDBox from years ago, and messed around with that, still nothing, so i tried it with 37.300. same thing.

I am struggling, mainly due to not using this in years, can anyone help?

thanks in advance

[Jope]

The driver name is scsi.device, you shouldn't need to adjust the tooltypes at all in order to see the drive. Please note that the driver name is case sensitive, fully lower case.

Sounds odd, is your card listed in the compatibility list elsewhere in this forum?

[Pat the Cat]

CF booting from PCMCIA is different to CF booting from an IDE or SCSI adaptor. Where it boots from determines how you have to set it up. Media from the IDE port needs scsi.device, ie a Rigid Disk Block. Media on the PCMCIA port is always CC0: and can be INSTALLed and formated (but it will take a LONG time to format a 2GB device on an A600).

Just in case you are trying to boot it from PCMCIA, if not, ignore this post.

[idrougge]

Originally Posted by Pat the Cat

Media on the PCMCIA port is always CC0: and can be INSTALLed

Wrong. CF cards on the PCMCIA port are CF0: and cannot be INSTALLed.

Originally Posted by Pat the Cat

and formated (but it will take a LONG time to format a 2GB device on an A600).

Wrong. Formatting takes circa five seconds.

Originally Posted by Pat the Cat

Just in case you are trying to boot it from PCMCIA, if not, ignore this post.

Just like you ignored his post?
He wrote this:

Originally Posted by Toryglen-boy

Trying to setup a CF card with IDE adaptor

[Daedalus]

@Pat the Cat

While everyone appreciates that you're trying to help, you're jumping on a lot of these topics as a voice of authority while actually presenting lots of out-of-date, irrelevant, or just plain wrong information. Perhaps it would be more useful for you to pause for a while and catch up on the past 20 years of Amiga development that you missed, and maybe gain some experience with current solutions before wading straight in as currently you're mostly just adding confusion to many users' questions.

[Amiga1992]

Originally Posted by Daedalus

While everyone appreciates that you're trying to help, you're jumping on a lot of these topics as a voice of authority while actually presenting lots of out-of-date, irrelevant, or just plain wrong information. Perhaps it would be more useful for you to pause for a while and catch up on the past 20 years of Amiga development that you missed, and maybe gain some experience with current solutions before wading straight in as currently you're mostly just adding confusion to many users' questions.

Thanks Daedalus.

[E-Penguin]

Originally Posted by Toryglen-boy

I plug the 2Gb Transcend card into the reader, build an Amiga, same roms etc in WinUAE, partition the drive, set it up etc. all goes sweet as a nut. i then plugged it into the A600, HDToolbox has a message like "driver not installed", and it can't see anything, all buttons are masked out.

When you set it up in winuae did you set the tool type to device=uaehf.device? One usually has to, in order to partition the CF under the emulator. Make sure you changed it back to scsi.device and click "save" after you're done, as the real amiga doesn't know anything about uaehf.device.

[paul1981]

@Toryglen-boy

Did you confirm that WinUAE could boot from it after you had set it up? Seems an obvious and silly question I know, but someone needs to ask it - just to make sure.

Are you using FFS from KS2 then? Did you read the drive configuration from within HDToolBox on WinUAE?

[rare_j]

I've never used a transcend cf card with an amiga, but I remember from a few years ago reading that they dont adhere to the IDE compatibility standards like sandisk cards do.
I also remember reading some reports where transcend cards didnt work on amiga ide. Although that was then, and transcend may have changed in the meantime. How old is the card? Can you check it against some compatinility lists here?
If you've got litrally any other card you can use just to try it out that would help.

[crazyc]

I have only ever used transcend 133x cards on my Amiga Ide setups. Only ones that didn't work were not bought from a proper store so likely dodgy anyway.

Sent from my S7 Edge

[rare_j]

Originally Posted by crazyc

I have only ever used transcend 133x cards on my Amiga Ide setups. Only ones that didn't work were not bought from a proper store so likely dodgy anyway.

Sent from my S7 Edge

Good news - thanks for the correction.

[Toryglen-boy]

Originally Posted by paul1981

@Toryglen-boy

Did you confirm that WinUAE could boot from it after you had set it up? Seems an obvious and silly question I know, but someone needs to ask it - just to make sure.

Are you using FFS from KS2 then? Did you read the drive configuration from within HDToolBox on WinUAE?

Hi there, yeah, i can boot from it in UAE no probs, just not on a real amiga! used transcend cards, as i had read they where ok, although after formatting it with FAT, and popping it into the PCMCIA card, the Amiga coulnd't see it, although it could see the spare Sandisk card i have no issue.

The card was setup on UAE as IDE 0, i am sure its got something to do with the tooltypes, "device=uaehf.device" seems to make sense, if i load up the card to UAE, and change the drive to SCSI instad of IDE, i get the same error, just the HDtoolbox screen, everything masked out, and where the drive(s) are usually listed, it just says, "no driver installed". i am sure its a simple fix, when reading the drive config in UAE, it had filetype, and devicename fields, i wonder of that has anything to do with it.

many thanks to anyone who is trying to help me here, it is appreciated.

[crazyc]

I am not claiming to be right or any kind of expert. Just sharing my experience. 👍

Sent from my S7 Edge

[E-Penguin]

Originally Posted by Toryglen-boy

after formatting it with FAT, and popping it into the PCMCIA card, the Amiga coulnd't see it

I'm pretty sure you'd need to format it as something other than FAT for the Amiga to read it. Probably winuae is letting you get away with with FAT but the Amiga can't understand it.

Try pfs3-aio- it works on all versions of kickstart and can be loaded into the boot block of the disk itself (that is, the Amiga can load the driver to read the disk from the disk itself. Via voodoo).

There are good guides on the net, do a Google for "PFS3 install"

[Toryglen-boy]

Originally Posted by E-Penguin

I'm pretty sure you'd need to format it as something other than FAT for the Amiga to read it. Probably winuae is letting you get away with with FAT but the Amiga can't understand it.

Try pfs3-aio- it works on all versions of kickstart and can be loaded into the boot block of the disk itself (that is, the Amiga can load the driver to read the disk from the disk itself. Via voodoo).

There are good guides on the net, do a Google for "PFS3 install"

i meant the card in PCMCIA slot, formatted to FAT couldn't be seen, it was just a test to see if it can be seen other ways, trying to use it with an IDE controller tho.

thanks. i will give all this PFS3 thing a look, another curious quirk, is that i cant quick format it, it wants to do a full format?

[Daedalus]

Inserting a card in the PCMCIA slot can be any filesystem you have a filesystem driver for. The compactflash.device driver comes with a mountlist that can see and mount FAT formatted cards perfectly well once the Fat95 filesystem is installed in L:. On the IDE controller however it needs to have a RDB installed so that it can be used before the OS is fully loaded. If it shows up in the early startup menu in WinUAE, and you can boot from it, it's set up correctly. The problem must be the low-level compatibility, which is a common enough issue unfortunately and won't show up in WinUAE as it's accessing the card in a different way. Sandisk do seem to be the recommended manufacturer, and I've never had any problems with them personally.

Don't do a full format on a CF card (or any storage made in the past 20 years). At best it just wastes time, at worst it causes unnecessary wear to the cells of flash storage. There is no benefit to a full format as bad blocks will be remapped by the card/drive's firmware automatically.

[thomas]

If HDToolbox cannot see it on the real Amiga, then another file system does not help.

Some CF cards just don't work on the Amiga's IDE. Try another one. Try it first in the Amiga. If HDToolbox sees it then you can use WinUAE to install it. If it is not seen by HDToolbox then all effort with WinUAE is just wasted time.

[E-Penguin]

Isn't there a Thing where some CF cards are marked as removable storage, and have problems?

http://eab.abime.net/showthread.php?t=61666

[Daedalus]

Yep, but with the standard scsi.device that shouldn't be an issue. It's only if you're using other drivers like atapi.device that the removable flag is an issue.

[fgh]

It might be an incompatible card but I'm not convinced until you tell us the exact error message you get from hdtoolbox, and what the tooltype scsi_device_name is currently set to. (on real hw, not in uae)