CF Card Problems I cant Find Answered Elsewhere. Please Help Me Retain My Sanity.

[fishyfish]

Im hoping someone will be able to help me out here as its been a thorn in my side for nearly 12 months and I cant really use my amiga as Id like when its in a state of disarray.

Anyway, it goes a little something like this:

For my birthday last year Cammy and Rebel-cd32 where kind enough to send me an ide -> cf adaptor and an 8gig cf card. This worked fine (still does) and it was fun to try something that was new to me. 8 gig however is far from enough storage space. Even on a 68k amiga some games take 1gig and upwards each and sound and video chews through 8gig way too easily.
My brother, unbeknown to me had also bought me a 32gig card for my birthday, and upon receiving it I was pretty happy.
32 gig for internal "drive" I told myself, and 8 gig via pcmcia slot to transfer files back and forward easily isnt too bad. This however has been purely theory thus far however as these things simply refuse to work as they should.

Ive installed idefix97, and patched scsi.device. Once this was done (through winuae for convenience) things appeared ok. I was happy that things were working and even more or less closed a thread Id started thinking things were good. Once I transferred the card back to my amiga however I discovered things werent as "fixed" as Id believed. While all partitions (pfs3 by the way) show up on the desktop all beyond 8gig are invalidated. I can format these partitions and use them, but once I reboot the machine they become invalidated again. Incidently all partitions work fine under Winuae without the need to reformat them (even data I copy to them after formatting on my amiga shows up under winuae).
Im completely stumped here, and more than a little frustrated.

Now a few months ago, once again Cammy and Rebel-CD32 were kind enough to send me a pcmcia->cf adaptor (which was tested in an a1200 before it wa s sent to me to make sure it works). Once again however its proving to be a majot pain to get it working. I have fat95 installed, have a working mountlist for "pcf0" (what Ive named it) and have pccard.device installed, but it simply refuses to co-operate.
Closest Ive gotten thus far is for pcf0: to mount, but as an ndos disk. It also only reads as 3.8gig. Additionally Ive only been able to get it to even mount using fat32. Fat, fat ext, fat12, and fat16 all completely fail to work.

If anyone can help me solve these problems they'd have my eternal gratitude. I really want to use my amiga, but cant focus with a half working system.

Oh, for the record Im using a KS3.0 a1200 + 40mhz apollo 1240 card.

[fitzsteve]

Hi!

I think the problem is you're trying to patch the scsi.device and use IDEFix97, as I understand you need one or the other, not both to achieve large disk support Maybe they're cancelling each other out?

For the CF adapter, I use 'compactflash.device' and Fat95, from Aminet. My CF's mount as 'CF0' my CF cards for PCMCIA are Fat32 formatted but I had better success with smaller CF's <2gb. Some CF just refuse to work on PCMCIA.

By the way you didn't say what OS you're using, this might make a difference. For example the Classic Workbench packs have simple support for large disks and also I noticed one particular scsi.device wasn't compatible with 8gb Kingston my CF card. (v 43.24) it just caused a guru & reboot loop so you may want to also try another scsi.device if you don't use IDEFix97 since there's no need unless you are using a CDROM or 4Way IDE device?

All the best,

Steve.

[cosmicfrog]

yep I`m with steve on this KS3.0 so u prob using wb3.1
just patch ya scsi.device did you use scsi.device for your HDDs while in winUAE I`m guessing not, thats why they worked.

don`t know about using the pcmcia port see above

If you were useing workbench 3.5 and 3.9 I dought u would have seen these problems as both patch scsi.device and fastfilesystem

you still want keep ya boot partion in the first 4Gb

steve do u know which version did`t like the 8gig drive as I had a similar problem which I havent put a satisfactory answer to but cos I used patched software and my hardware has moved on I did`t really get to find out what the problem was

[fitzsteve]

Originally Posted by cosmicfrog

steve do u know which version did`t like the 8gig drive as I had a similar problem which I havent put a satisfactory answer to but cos I used patched software and my hardware has moved on I did`t really get to find out what the problem was

Yeah v43.24 was Mr Guru (following the CWB tutorial) I'm using 43.45 now by Chris/Toni, but there are other options by Cosmos and Doobrey. I've not really researched the differences tho tbh.

[fishyfish]

Ah, sorry, I forgot Im using OS3.1.

As for IDEFix97, I just checked and I'd commented it out so am only using a patched scsi.device (43.23).
Im starting to think that maybe some partitions aren't actually using pfs3. Will do some experimenting and come back to the thread.

[Toni Wilen]

Use new enough winuae (has more partition logging), UAE HD controller and check winuaelog.txt for partition information, does it match expected partition information?

[fishyfish]

Decided to tack this again.
I checked winuaelog.txt and apparently partition info. does match what I was wanting (ie. pfs3).

Im pretty stumped now.

Been a while since this thread was, "active", so to do a quick rehash:

Patched scsi.device to 43.23
installed pfs3 and partition the cf card (32GB)
Under Winuae I can use all partitions "as normal"
On my Amiga only partitions in 1st 8gig are useable. The rest claim to be uninitialised.
Using a1200+apollo1240, kick3.0 and WB3.1.

Any help, ideas or suggestions would be appreciated.

Thanks in advance

[thomas]

Please run this one the Amiga: http://aminet.net/package/disk/misc/check4gb
and attach the saved log here.

Patched scsi.device to 43.23

Did you store the patched file in Devs and did nothing else? Or did you also add something to startup-sequence?

If the former, then it's clear. You can store everything you want it Devs. As long as it is nowhere referenced, it is just ignored.

If the latter then please quote your addition here.

[fishyfish]

Nope, nothing in my startup-sequence.

Here's my 4GB log. Stuff0 is just a temporary folder I use to easiy transfer files through Winuae incase you wondered


Name Volume Size Device Unit Version DosType Version Big Check
CC0 20K carddisk 0 40.1 DOS1 40.1 no ok
DF0 880K trackdisk 0 40.1 DOS0 40.1 no ok
stuff0 stuff 1904K uae 1 DOS0 40.10 no ok
CF0 AmigaOS 660M uaehf 0 1.0 PFS3 18.3 no ok
CF1 Work 2079M uaehf 0 1.0 PFS3 18.3 no ok
CF10 Backup 659M uaehf 0 1.0 PFS3 18.3 no ok
CF11 OtherOS 608M uaehf 0 1.0 PFS3 18.3 no ok
CF2 Projects 4057M uaehf 0 1.0 PFS3 18.3 yes ok
CF3 Emulation 4007M uaehf 0 1.0 PFS3 18.3 yes ok
CF4 Games 6289M uaehf 0 1.0 PFS3 18.3 yes ok
CF5 4058M uaehf 0 1.0 PFS3 18.3 yes ok
CF6 Temp 4057M uaehf 0 1.0 PFS3 18.3 yes ok
CF7 Storage 4056M uaehf 0 1.0 PFS3 18.3 yes ok

[thomas]

Which part of "run it on the Amiga" didn't you understand?

[fishyfish]

Seeing as my last response to this was deleted I'll re-itterate.

How about some manners? Have you never made a mistake? Your response is highly condescending and unnecessary.

Dont worry about it. I'll work it out myself.

[Cymru]

Er, Thomas is very smart but has personality issues.

[fgh]

Original versions of PFS3 only support TD64 and your version of scsi.device only supports NSD. (AFAIK IDEfix is the only scsi.device patch that supports TD64)

You can solve it by using PFS3AiO (by Toni Wilen) or by replacing v43.23 with IDEfix.
(However, IDEfix has a major flaw that freezes your computer completely upon loading with certain types of CF cards, see the sticky CF/SD/large drives FAQ)

Good luck

Edit: Not all limitations of scsi.device are applied in WinUAE, especially not when using the UAE hd-controller.

Edit 2:
A third option would be to use directSCSI instead of TD64 or NSD. (= Replace PFS3 18.3 with PFS3DS 18.3 in RDB and change dostype to 50445303 (PFS3DS) on all partitions)

[fishyfish]

Just to update, I finally got the 32gig problem sorted

Seems I wasnt far off all along. I was just using wrong version of pfs (pfs3, Im now using pfs3d).

The pcmcia problem however still persists. Ive had it display the drive on workbench a few times, but trying to use it just results in a "disk is empty" message.

[fgh]

You´re welcome! (A thank you would be nice, although it seems you didn´t even read my previous post?)

Fitzsteve also gave you some nice hints for the pcmcia adapter, you could always start there. (Get latest versions of cfd and fat95, and use the included CF0 dosdriver. Never heard of pccard.device..)

[fishyfish]

Nope, hadnt noticed your response. Thanks anyway.

Yeah, Ive followed Fitzseteve's suggestions, but with no luck.
Im a bit stumped here. Everything has been used elsewhere, but I cant seem to get it working on my own Amiga. Id suspect the psmcia slot if I hadnt used it for networking before (although it seems to be more than a little temperamental there too sometimes).