A600 update! - more help required....

[foob]

Well, as i said there should be another PCMCIA adapter on its way, which i'm surprised hasn't arrived already as i ordered it on the 9th. However, i'm not expecting that to be the problem given i've tested it in a laptop with PCMCIA and formatted the card fine.

I'm still convinced it's a software problem. Is it possible to format the card in FFS using winUAE? and for that matter, is it safe for the card?

[jimbob]

I haven't tried it but I don't see any reason you can't use an amiga file system on a pcmcia CF card. You will need to adjust the mountlist to include an entry using FFS and compactflash.device.

Also, this isn't as convoluted as you thought before for file transfer. You just need to boot an emulated WB with the amiga filesystem CF mounted as as an HD, and a windows folder or drive also mounted. Then, within WB, just directly copy the adfs from the windows disk to the amiga CF.

Btw, fat95 definitely works on KS37.299

[foob]

i'm having a little difficulty actually being able to format the disk in WinUAE, it "cannot open disk for format" apparently.

Also, when mounting a folder/directory, it doesnt show any contents.

[Amiga1992]

You have to mount the CF card as a hard disk drive, not as a folder.
Then it won't appear on Workbench, you have to prepare it with HD Toolbox.
Now you can follow that guide you posted before ,from step 1.
Be careful not to mount a system drive and destroy your PC's hard drive.

[hansel75]

Also if your going try do an amiga format through winuae on your cf card, you may need to clean the card from it's windows format first.

To do this open a command prompt and type this--

list disk (remember the number of the CF card in the list)
select disk n (replace n by the number of the CF card)
clean

Han.

[demolition]

And if you're trying 'diskpart' then be very sure you actually cleaning the correct disk or you could wipe out your system disk.

Edit: Ok, perhaps the system disk is protected, but any other could be wiped out.

[fgh]

You also need to run WinUAE as administrator to add physical harddrives.

I have never done it myself, but I know people have used CF cards in PCMCIA with amiga file systems.
In addition to specifying file system and device driver (compactflash.device) in the mountfile, you also need to define the geometry (size) of the card. (FAT95 doesn't need this)
Giggledisk on aminet will help you find the correct values.

I've also tried the Kingston 4GB and 16GB CF cards on PCMCIA.
They do not work (CF0: 'no disk present...'). But Kipper2K uses a 4GB Kingston card with the flower image in his a600 PCMCIA, and his card works. I guess there are several revisions..

Anyway - compactflash.device's incompatibility with some CF cards has nothing to do with the speed rating of the CF card.
It's still not clear what causes the incompatibilities though, but Toni Wilen confirmed one thing that cause it (there are probably more) - a Maxtor CF card's lack of support for all mandatory register locations. (Amiga/CFD uses different register locations than PC's apparently.)
I also tested the non-working Kingston 4GB card in an old mac in its 16bit PCMCIA interface, where it worked perfectly.

And by the way - I've tested ~15 different SD and CF cards between 32MB and 16GB on the IDE of my 37.300 a600. They all work well

Good luck!

[foob]

Just a little update/continuation here for the time being. I haven't deserted you all/the a600, just i haven't been able to work on it for a while nor will i be able to for a week or so. Hang tight and i'll get back to it as soon as i possibly can.