FYI SCSI2SD & WinUae

[Sinphaltimus]

So I prepped an SD card in a CF adaptor on my PC for a real Amiga. It's not currently compatible with my real Amiga due to hardware requirements (I have a vanilla A500 with 1MB chip and a 68000) but I am prepping it for use with my Vampire board when it arrives.

Anyway, I decided to try putting the SD card into my SCSI2Sd adaptor connected to a GVP Impact Series II HD+ controller to see what would happen.

well, it worked. Of course I got a stop error about C:StackAttack because I'm running a 68000 but it did actually start to boot. So it works.

I was surprised by this because the SCSI2SD comes with a utility to setup SCSI HDDs with SCSI IDs and all. I had to use that utility to set it up initially then partition and install on the real Amiga.

EDIT: To set it up initially when I received it not at all using WinUAE to do so. I used a completely different SD card with WinUAE. One that was never prepared using SCSI2SD-Util.

However; it appears that is all unnecessary. You can setup the Sd card in WinUAE solely and it works in a real Amiga on a real SCSI controller.

I thought some of you with the SCSI2SD adaptor might find this interesting and useful so I'm sharing the info here.

[aperez]

Originally Posted by Sinphaltimus

So I prepped an SD card in a CF adaptor on my PC for a real Amiga. It's not currently compatible with my real Amiga due to hardware requirements (I have a vanilla A500 with 1MB chip and a 68000) but I am prepping it for use with my Vampire board when it arrives.

Anyway, I decided to try putting the SD card into my SCSI2Sd adaptor connected to a GVP Impact Series II HD+ controller to see what would happen.

well, it worked. Of course I got a stop error about C:StackAttack because I'm running a 68000 but it did actually start to boot. So it works.

I was surprised by this because the SCSI2SD comes with a utility to setup SCSI HDDs with SCSI IDs and all. I had to use that utility to set it up initially then partition and install on the real Amiga.

EDIT: To set it up initially when I received it not at all using WinUAE to do so. I used a completely different SD card with WinUAE. One that was never prepared using SCSI2SD-Util.

However; it appears that is all unnecessary. You can setup the Sd card in WinUAE solely and it works in a real Amiga on a real SCSI controller.

I thought some of you with the SCSI2SD adaptor might find this interesting and useful so I'm sharing the info here.

SCSI2SD-util (for version 5) does not "prepare" a microSD card. This is a common misconception. The drive volume parameters (size, etc) live in the embedded flash of the board itself, not on the SD card. That said, your assertion above that configuring the board using scsi2sd-util is "all unnecessary" is completely incorrect.

[Sinphaltimus]

I'm not sure how to better communicate what I did. Basically, I setup an sd card in a cf card adaptor on my PC using WinUAE. Never once using the SCSI2SD utility on it. Then I simply inserted the SD card in to the SCSI2SD adaptor and my Amiga attempted to boot off it to the point where I didn't have enough ram to load StackAttack. I'm sure what I did can easily be replicated.

[E-Penguin]

OK, so I understand the SCSI2SD v5 doesn't modify the actual contents of the SD card, and that WinUAE can't mount the whole card if it is split into "parts" because it doesn't know about how it is split.

But....

Imagine I have a 16Gb SD card, configured as 4x 4GB "parts" in scsi2sd-util. If I partition and format the 1st 4Gb part on the Amiga, presumably this bit would be visible in WinUAE, as if I had set up a new drive with hdtools and make the disk geometry too small. Then I could use this partition for transfer in WinUAE and then move data about once back in the A590/scsi2sd module.

No?

[Jope]

Should work.

[E-Penguin]

Just tried this, and I can confirm it works. This should make setting things up much easier.

[Caldor]

I am setting up my CDTV hard disk and its also using this. I am having a hard time setting it up though since I do not have WB 1.3 on my CDTV, I just burned a CD with Fred Fish 1.6 and am using it to "initialize" my partitions.

Main problem is it uses rom 1.3. So what I did get to work is setting up the hard disk with two partitions, one of them was smaller than 1gb, and it worked. The second partition was 2gb and it could not be initialized, so I guess the partitions I make in WinUAE has to match... but I just tried that and guess my partitioning did not completely match how I had setup the controller with the SD2SCSI tool.

Anyone here who can share some information about how it setup your SD cards? What I need is the start and end cylinders and such... hmmm, probably wont work anyway. Once formatted I cannot see the partitions in the HDToolBox or the HDInstTools

I think I will try what I got to work first, make a small partition, format it, and copy the files I need to it, then make some Workbench 1.3 disks on the CDTV.

[sodapop]

Originally Posted by Sinphaltimus

However; it appears that is all unnecessary. You can setup the Sd card in WinUAE solely and it works in a real Amiga on a real SCSI controller.

I thought some of you with the SCSI2SD adaptor might find this interesting and useful so I'm sharing the info here.

Very interesting as I tried to make my SCSI2SD work with an A2090a SCSI controller... I would love to set the whole thing up under WinUAE this way !
But my guess is it should not work with an A2090a controller, as it has a special drive geometry, from what I understood (it doesn't use HDToolBox, but a custom software to prepare the disk).
I will give it a go however