Using a Compact Flash card on a600/a1200 IDE

[JackTheKnife]

Maybe I need to get another version? What is suggested? Thanks.

[prowler]

Not a great deal is known about the compatibility of particular CF-IDE adapters with the Amiga. IIRC, some have been mentioned earlier in this thread and the EAB CF card compatibility list.

I would suggest that you just try to get a different one and see whether that is any better. Some types accept two CF cards, and these are reported to work on the Amiga.

[JackTheKnife]

SanDisk Extreme III 4GB it is CF-type I or II card? Maybe this one adapter will work: http://cgi.ebay.com/44-Pin-IDE-To-CF...d=p3286.c0.m14 ?

[prowler]

Hi Jack,

The Type I CF cards are 3.3mm thick and Type II cards are 5mm thick. See this page.

Recent cards are Type II, e.g. the SanDisk II Ultra is a Type II card and the Extreme III is bound to be Type II as well.

The adapter you are looking at now will accept both Type I and II cards, though I have to say it looks very similar to the one you already have. Still, it might work neverthess.

[Eclipse]

These things are invaluble when used with a CF card. You can use WinUAE to set it up as a HD, and it's easy to take it out and put in the Amiga. Swapping between PC and Amiga is very easy.

My First Post Here! Please be gentle

I have just come back to the Amiga after many years. With my original A500, I barely got past playing games, so may terms here are a bit alien to me... but I am not a techno-noob either.

I've just got an A600 from ebay, Kickstart rev v37.350, with the intention of adding a compact flash card as an IDE replacement and using WHDLoad. Unfortunately, I have to use Winuae, as the workbench disk set I received was not complete.

I am using a Kingston 133x 8gb which I had laying around (as you do). The card works fine in my PC's usb adapter, and the IDE2CF adapter also seems to work fine in my PC.

So far, I have managed to create one 1000mb boot partition, and have installed wb2.1 on to that using WinUAE. The card is now sat in my Amiga.

Now, the questions.

Using HDToolbox, I can create extra partitions. If I create one less than 1gb, it will, more likely than not, format okay. If I create a partition larger, the partition initialises but reports "Invalid Dos Disk". The partition is then reported as being 100% full.

I found the "SweetSpot" is around 1006mb, less than this formats generally okay, more always fails. Does anyone know why this is happening? Is this because the drive is too large (8GB), or too fast (x133)? I know I cant create a partition>4gb, but I thought >1gb would be okay?

Also, when I set the MaxTransfer flag in HDTools, save the partition info then go back to inspect the setting, it has reverted back to 0xFFFFFFFF. Is this normal, or can this flag only be set when first partitioning the drive?

I have seen WB3.1 roms & disk sets for the A600 availiable. Would upgrading to 3.1 be more stable. Would it allow larger partitions? What would be a good price in the UK for the set?

I have read through the threads relating to this, but cannot find anything that answers these specific questions, or anyone with a similar issue to me.

I'll leave it here for now!

[rkauer]

Because the A600's kickstart version (37.350) does not support HD with more than 2Gb.

Installing ROM3.1 (kickstart 40.63) will let you to use up to 4Gb of the CF. And Workbench 3.1 is better than the original 2.x supplied with the A600.

Plain and simple.

[cosmicfrog]

and dont forget to press enter key after you changed MaxTransfer, thats why it keeps defaulting back to what it was before

[kipper2k]

Hi All,

I know this has been flogged to death but i am trying to find a Max transfer value i can use with my 4gb Transcend card which is really causing me grief.

Heres whats going on,

Heres 4 sample games that crash when i try to run them from my ide mounted Card (the card is a 4GB card formatted with 2 default partitions of just less than 2GB each).

Games i try to run for example is

Addams family
alien breed
Abandonded places
Alien Breed tower assault AGA

They all crash moaning of generic errors so i tried a little experiment, i plugged in my PCMCIA FAT formatted (4GB) card and used Dopus to copy the games from the IDE mounted card (They are on the boot partition), and copied them to the PCMCIA CF card.

I ran the games from the PCMCIA mounted card and guess what... they all worked (except for the tower assualt cos i think the .slave name is greater than 32 characters) so thats telling me that there is an issue with the IDE mounted card reading data somehow which doesnt affect copy mode but has nasty results when trying to run a game.

Does anyone has some numbers for max transfer i can throw in to try.

i did try $1ffffe, $1fffffe and no luck


Thanks All.


edit...
Heres info from one of Alexh's post and the value he recommended worked great

"I am positive this is the logical answer as to why MAX TRANSFER should be "0x1FE00" for IDE devices."

[Jope]

Yep, no point in even trying to iterate the maxtransfer value, just use 0x1fe00

[emuola]

Ok, my miggy has a partially busted pcmcia slot. A couple of the first/last pins are bent/broken. However the slot seems to work. If I use a sd-card (FAT16) with an adaptor it sees the card and I can browse it with Dopus. The problem is that if I for example extract a zip-file on the sd-card in Dopus, everything goes fine. no errors. BUT, if I then try to check the files they're not there (on the card) I have to reboot etc etc the miggy to "update" the contens of the card. Is this the card reset patch -thingy or just my partially busted pcmcia slot?

[Jope]

How many pins and from which side of the machine?

[emuola]

Ok, here's a photo. It's the first (upper) pin that is broken. The one below looks like it's "stuffed in" or something. The bent pins actually fit in with the adapter ok (afaik).

[Jope]

If they make contact, then it should work and you're probably experiencing a sw problem. The edgemost broken pins are grounds.

Unfortunately it probably won't add to the stability of it that D2 is pushed in half way.

Look at the documentation for cfd, you can try and adjust the parameters given in the dosdriver if it doesn't seem to update the card.

[emuola]

I installed cardparch and cardreset and indeed the adapter now correctly mounts/unmouts the card when inserted/re-inserted. However, if I for example copy a few whdload games to the card and run them I usually get some kind of errors and after that the contents of the card is totally screwed up. Filenemes/directory names turn to a complete garbage etc etc and some of them are lost.

Would you more experienced fellows agree that this is probably due to the bent/broken pins or not?

[Jope]

I would definitely fix the slot first, that can't be very reliable.

[emuola]

One more thing: Is there any experince on whether a SD-card actually behaves exactly the same as a CF-card regarding OS 3.1? I mean could the reason be that I'm running a SD-card instead of a CF-card? I have a spare 32 MB CF at work, so I could try that sometime next week. The adapter I'm running is a "multiadapter" that accepts SD, CF, MMC etc etc.

I would definitely fix the slot first, that can't be very reliable.

Ok, do you know where to get a spare pcmcia slot? And most importantly: Is the soldering challenge something a novice can handle? Replacing the whole mobo would cost something like 50 € I'd rather buy a whole new amiga from Amigakit for 130 €.

I'm not so keen on the soldering as you can see

[Jope]

You might need to add flags = 2 in the dosdriver.

A spare slot can be had from a broken A1200 or A600 motherboard, you need to know how to solder in order to get it out intact, though.

[emuola]

Ok, I had to get the cf-card and test... It seems better and even better with that flags=2. Thank you Jope for that The dirs don't get corrupted anymore, but it seems that for example 4d sports driving has some weird filenames (a few spaces in a single filename) that the fat95 doesn't like. The file is reported as "not found" or something similar. Is this a known limitation of fat16/fat95 or what? The game works fine from the internal cf-hd (ffs).

The soldering-from- busted-A1200 sounds a bit daunting I'll have to expreriment a bit more, but basically I cannot "bypass" the problem. I could try to transfer files via lan, though. Haven't tried a network adapter in the busted pcmcia slot, so unfortunately that's speculation only.

[protek]

I've got the HX-2108 type of adapter mentioned at this posting of this thread for my A4000.

I'm wondering, if I got the IDE cable the right way. The connector is physically right as the notch fits the tab in the connector and both the adapter's and mobo's #1 pin is along the red lead of the cable. Yet, when I boot my A4000, the led on the adapter and the front bezel just glows constantly instead of blinking randomly as it probably should. I don't have a suitable monitor cable, therefore I'm not able to verify what happens on the screen. The floppy does click, though.

My CF card has OS3.1 preinstalled on WinUAE and it operates ok in my PC.

Can anyone help me with this?