CF / SD and large drives FAQ

[Mikeat1200]

Two pictures...
Compact Flash Card inside:
http://www.dansdata.com/images/io043...tflash1024.jpg

SD Card inside:
http://www.schrankmonster.de/content...3/IMG_0985.jpg

[Solo761]

I tried prepping SD card in WinUAE but failed in the end, first hdtoolbox/hdinsttools complained about it being removable, and when I installed errors started to appear. I guess it's because of removable status. Also, I guess if I used SD to IDE adapter, and connected it to IDE to USB and mounted it that way it would work fine.

Few weeks ago I ordered this

www.ebay.com/itm/111343489783

It woorks pretty good so far. It's set as IDE device, not removable so no problem there. Only downside is that it's type II, so your card reader also to support type II card (i.e. it's thicker than regular CF cards, which are type I). For CF to IDE adapter this is not an issue, they're "open" so height is no problem.

But there are ways around that, this one was SD to CF, there are micro SD to CF adapters that are type I, and even Dual slot micro SD to CF adapters, but I don't have a clue if and how they work. Do they combine space or you see it as two CFs I don't know.

[Toni Wilen]

Originally Posted by Solo761

I tried prepping SD card in WinUAE but failed in the end, first hdtoolbox/hdinsttools complained about it being removable, and when I installed errors started to appear. I guess it's because of removable status. Also, I guess if I used SD to IDE adapter, and connected it to IDE to USB and mounted it that way it would work fine.

WinUAE should hide the removable state when mounted as a harddrive. Also removable or not won't matter with Commodore's scsi.device. HDToolBox may complain ("wrong type" or something like that) but there is patch in Aminet that fixes it.

[Solo761]

It didn't, I had the same problem with Kingston 16GB 266x Compact Flash. In both WinUAE (IDE0, not UAE controller) and on real amiga.

I later remembered I had IDE/IDE44/SATA to USB adapter so I connected this same kingston to IDE to CF and plugged in this USB adapter and successfully prepped this card. Just yesterday i tried it again with same card and PFS3 18.5. Copied at least 7-8 GB to it without problems... While it's connected via IDE to USB adapter it doesn't complain about it being wrong type.

[Toni Wilen]

Originally Posted by Solo761

It didn't, I had the same problem with Kingston 16GB 266x Compact Flash. In both WinUAE (IDE0, not UAE controller) and on real amiga.

I later remembered I had IDE/IDE44/SATA to USB adapter so I connected this same kingston to IDE to CF and plugged in this USB adapter and successfully prepped this card. Just yesterday i tried it again with same card and PFS3 18.5. Copied at least 7-8 GB to it without problems... While it's connected via IDE to USB adapter it doesn't complain about it being wrong type.

Are you really sure your config and HDtoolbox version and everything was exact same because IDE emulation drive data flags (that includes removable bits and others) are hardcoded, they can't change. Only drive size parameters are variable.

[Solo761]

Yes, config is the same. For prepping I use one I made last year, mostly default A1200, only processor selected is 68040 with no limit to speed. Helps when copying a lot of files . Also, scsi.device used is the same every time (44.20) and HDtoolbox is default from WB3.1. I tried HDInstTools, I don't remember if it did or didn't "complain" about removable drive, but there were also a lot of errors, sometimes even partitions would go missing. But since I plugged it in CF to IDE, and that to IDE to USB not a single problem.

I have to open my A1200 and see if it'll work as it works now in WinUAE.

[fgh]

For this to make any sense you need to be more specific about what kind of errors you were getting, both in hdtoolbox and hdinsttools, and afterwards when things didn't work.
The 'Unit is not a disk (Type 7)' message in HdToolbox can safely be ignored.

Whether a card reports as removable or not should not be related to its stability or produce random errors. IDEFix/IComp drivers hang completely, otherwise it just works, (after you ignore the Type 7 message)

[Solo761]

I messed with it about two months ago, error was something about blocks on HDD, even while booting from it. I would set partition (500MB, FFS format), everything would look fine, put CWB on it, still everything looked fine and after some minutes, sometimes 10, sometimes 30 it would start to throw out errors, sometimes even at boot time. And on occasions partition would simply dissapear, sometimes it would reappear if I went to HDToolBox and lowered max transfer rate (below 0x1fe00, i.e. to 0xfe00), but that could be simply because I made HDToolBox write info to it again.

I wrote in more detail about these issues here

http://eab.abime.net/showthread.php?p=944105#post944105

http://eab.abime.net/showthread.php?p=945391#post945391

I had all kinds of trouble with it so in the end I figured it's simply not good for Amiga use. That's why I never wrote exact error I got. As CF on PC via reader it worked fine, tested it with H2testw few times and there were no errors.

Few weeks ago I thought why not try it with SATA/IDE to USB adapter and for some reason in setup like this it works flawlessly. At least in WinUAE. When I find some time I'll try it in real Amiga and see how it turnes out .

[fgh]

Ah, I remember your posts now
There has been a couple reports that scsi.device 44.2 has issues with PFS3, but again they have been vaguely described. I used 44.2 and PFS3 (original and AiO) for a long time and never had trouble wth it.
I'll be happy to test the card properly if you'd send it to me.

[Toni Wilen]

Ah, that problem. Drive being removable (or not removable) is not the problem and can't be the problem. It is just a yet another mysterious random hardware incompatibility.

[Solo761]

I also think it's some kind of incompatibility, Transcend 16GB works fine, no name 4GB works fine, 16GB no name works fine, but this 16GB kingston and 16GB (micro) SD card had these kind of problems. Only thing in common was that SD and Kingston both reported as removable. Now that I think about it maybe it is related to this removable status. For all of them I used same card reader, maybe it handles differently if card reports as removable (be it CF or SD), maybe it reads wrong geometry in these cases and it worked over CD to IDE -> IDE to USB simply because it's different device that handles it correctly.

Recently I got another card reader. When I get home in few days I'll try to prep it again, but this time with this card reader and see how it behaves. So far I've only tried SD to CF adapter with it and it worked fine (this adapter is type II and old reader has type I slot so I had to get a new one).

@fgh

I've used 44.2 and PFS3 without any issues with other CF cards. Usually I make two partitions, first 500MB FFS for system and the rest PFS3 for WHDLoad and whatever. Since 18.5 version and bad block fix I switched to PFS3 on both partitions. Actually new PFS3 version was the reason I tried again, I wanted to see if bad block issue would happen again .



So far it didn't, buuuuut I had another issue . I tried to delete few GBs of WHDLoad games from partition (cca 8.5GB partition) with dopus, it went fine, but when I opened partition they were still there. Even after I formatted the partition. But that's another thing I need to retest. Partitions were created with first 18.5 PFS3, and I just replaced it to fixed 18.5 PFS3 in RDB.

Originally that CF had three partitions, 500MB FFS, 6000MB PFS3 and rest PFS3 (cca 8500MB). I deleted all partitions with HDToolBox from WB31, deleted filesystems from RDB, installed fixed 18.5, created three new partitions with same size (I use cylinder numbers to set size, so new partitions are exactly the same size as the old ones). Formated 500MB one, copied CWB to it and rebooted (this was all done via WB31 floppy/adf, I loaded scsi.device 44.2 manually prior to using HDToolBox). When CWB booted two big partitions were as before, although I deleted them. I guess deleting them didn't touch anything in filesystem so when I recreated them it just picked up. I deleted everything from 6000MB one (via Dopus) and it went fine, but when I deleted everything from ~8500MB one, everything somehow survived, although Dopus showed they were deleted. Same when I tried to format the partition. I "fixed" it by formatting the card in windows and filling it with files so, to be sure there are no amiga data structure left and prepped it from start.
Anyway, too early to tell, I'll have to try and recreate the problem, preferably with HDF file.

Gah, I wrote an "epic" again... I guess it's professional disorder, I currently work as software tester so "detailed" descriptions are what I do . I'll have to contain myself . Plus I need to go to sleep, I slept about 5 hours in last two days .

[Solo761]

I tried prepping the card with older reader and errors started again. I wasn't even able to extract Workbench to it or format it after extracting failed.



Older reader is different in one other aspect, while choosing the drive from WinUAE I have it as two devices, with newer one I have only one device.



Funny thing is that some cards work fine with older reader, Transced 16GB, No name 4GB and 16GB, all worked fine. Only this kingston 16GB doesn't like it. But at least this mistery was solved. If one gets strange errors with some cards try different reader.

[fgh]

I'm getting completely lost in your posts!

So you got a new USB card reader, and now the Kingston 266x CF card works reliably in WinUAE? Did you test it on the A600?

I speculate that the deleted files showing up again can be related to the CF's internal write buffers/caching. Could it be that the card was removed too soon?

[Solo761]

Yes, my old issue with kingston was due to card reader. For some reason it doesn't work as it should when used with it. With new one it works without a glitch.

I didn't test it (yet) on A600, I got another 16GB CF for it in the meantime. I tested it in WinUAE and on A1200, it works fine on both. When I tried it with old reader in WinUAE I couldn't even format partitions that are on it (pics above). After I put it in new reader I successfully formatted (without repartitioning) and copied everything without any errors.


Deleted files showing up is another issue, I'll have to play a bit some more to try and reproduce that error. That one isn't related to (old) card reader. It shouldn't be related to buffers/caching. Card was connected for few hours. I tried deleting them few times and it didn't help.

[cooyarpjm]

HELP: I have just purchased an IDE-SD adaptor and a 4gb SD card. I have set up the card under change drive type

Cyl 7566
Hds 16
B/T 63
B/Cyl 1008

Size -381544k (-372Meg)

I then go into partition drive it creates the 2 default drives as 1861 meg. BUT if I try to change this by deleting the partitions (As I like to have 3 [Workbench/Games/Storage]) it just lets me have one I.E. I adjust the size of the first partition say to 400meg and name it DH0 and press enter then if I click anywhere in the free space it just moves that first partition to that point. THIS IS ON A REAL AMIGA NOT UAE. Any ideas on what I'm doing wrong or it it's not me.

[fgh]

Click on new partition, then click within the free space.

[cooyarpjm]

Thanks can't believe I was so stupid. :s

[fgh]

Don't worry, blame the hdtoolbox GUI, it's outdated and confusing

[fitzsteve]

What would be awesome is a modern HDToolBox that can handle large drives, with a simple gui and support for PFS3/SFS built in.

Perhaps in boot Disk form as well which patches the scsi device on boot.

That's me dreaming

[fgh]

Thomas made a script to copy the 3.9 hdtoolbox to a (hd) floppy, then you can add scsi.device patches and pfs3aio.

Unfortunately some file is still missing: HDToolbox starts, but when writing to the device it fails. Someone needs to fire up snoopdos and identify the missing file(s). I didn't get to it yet..