Sandisk CF 4gb as IDE and HDToolbox settings

Hi everybody,

It's my first post here, have been lurking for years though

Recently I bought Sandisk 4gb CF card to replace old Kingston 1gb CF as main IDE drive. Unfortunately, when I used auto recognition of card parameters in HDToolbox 3.1 it said the card has "-176mb" capacity. Didn't know what to do, so I clicked OK and went to partitioning. Surprise, the card was 4gb again, so I created two partitions. Restarted Amiga, and formatted first partition. After 1.5 hours of formatting I've got "not a valid dos disk" error.

I'm little lost here, should I use different application to create partition, one that will recognise the card properly (Quarterback?), or should I play around with cylinders/heads/blocks settings in HDToolbox (tried that witout any success)?

best regards

Dominik

[StevenJGore]

Hi, welcome to the board!

To use my Sandisk Ultra II 4GB CF card, I had to use HDToolBox in OS3.9 BB2 running in WinUAE on my PC. I couldn't get it to work with my real A1200. Once partitioned and formatted in WinUAE, it worked fine in my real Amiga.

I also recommend using SmartFileSystem rather than FFS.

Steve.

[Toni Wilen]

Originally Posted by domleg

After 1.5 hours of formatting I've got "not a valid dos disk" error.

Do not use full format.

[pbareges]

yep toni is right, i myself exclusively use 4gb sandisk card on my IDE port and they all work fine on os3.0....do not worry about the size acknowledged by your system on recognition in hdtoolbox, it's just a display bug...so toni is right once again : only use quickformat with cf cards...

Thanks for hints everyone. Tried quickformat instead of full format, with same result. I guess I'll have to try UAE method..

thanks

Dominik

[illy5603]

This bit of advice given to me by Zetr0 may also be of some use.

--now in the drive setting, you will notice a particular feature, MAXTRANSFER, this setting isn't about speed but about size of the blocks it attempts to move about. you should set this to "0x1fe0000" and press enter to confirm.

[rkauer]

Also remember to not use partitions with more than 2Gb (HDToolBox is dumb enough to screw the partitions! Be warned).

Anyway, a 2Gb boot partition is an overkill! Prefer to create a smaller one (anything among 200~300Mb is more than sufficient!), then a work partition for programs (400Mb is more than enough), another for pictures, music, other data (1Gb or less) and the leftover for games

Or even two partitions for games (the bigger with less than 1.9Gb to avoid touch the "barrier").

[StevenJGore]

Also remember to not use partitions with more than 2Gb

Depends on the file system and what OS you'll be using. With OS3.9 BB2 and SmartFileSystem, all drive size and partition size limitations are removed. My 8GB CF card has a 7GB partition (for games, including all KG's WHDLoad packs! ).

With OS3.1 and FastFileSystem then yes, there will be 2GB limits per partition and 4GB limits on the disk size (or something like that, there's a sticky thread somewhere in this forum by Bloodwych with all the techy details in).

Steve.

[jurgen36]

Originally Posted by rkauer

Also remember to not use partitions with more than 2Gb (HDToolBox is dumb enough to screw the partitions! Be warned).

Anyway, a 2Gb boot partition is an overkill! Prefer to create a smaller one (anything among 200~300Mb is more than sufficient!), then a work partition for programs (400Mb is more than enough), another for pictures, music, other data (1Gb or less) and the leftover for games

Or even two partitions for games (the bigger with less than 1.9Gb to avoid touch the "barrier").

I really do not know, I use OS3.9. I prepared and formatted my 16 GByte CF Sandisk card as follows.
1st partition 1 GByte
2nd partition 7 Gbyte
3rd partition 8 Gbyte

I used HDInstall to partition the drive in FFS international and then used fast format. I also transferred the workbench 3.1 floppy to the boot drive. I tried at first to make the second partition 15GBytes but the system did not like that at all and I could not load the trashcan. After formatting I removed the CF card and in Amigakit I transferred the OS3.9 cd to the third partition of the cf card. Put the card back into the A1200 and fully installed the OS3.9. No troubles at all. I did the same to another machine with an 8 GByte cf card. 1st partition 2 GB and second partition 6 GB. Basically the same, it works perfect.
Regards

[StevenJGore]

16 GByte CF Sandisk card

Now that's just showing off!

I used HDInstall to partition the drive in FFS international and then used fast format.

That's interesting. I genuinely didn't think FFS would work with partitions as large as that.

I tried at first to make the second partition 15GBytes but the system did not like that at all

Ah, perhaps the limit is 8GB and not 4GB then. I get confused.

Steve.

[pbareges]

ffs can manage HDs up to 4gb. there's no formal partition limit but the dos file size limit is 2gb and that's why it is not recommended make partition bigger than 2gb...it's true you should have your boot partition as small as possible though...be careful even if ffs gives you the illusion you can manage up to 8gb it is a fake as ffs is not able to adress memory space bigger than 4gb...it will just rollover, meaning accessing the 6gb point will infact acces the 2gb point...screwing up everything!! so be careful!

I'd like to thank you all very much for help, I really appreciate it. Finally found the cause, it was lack of memory. Having just 1mb memory at that time I couldn't create partition bigger than few hundred megs, not to mention 2gb. With russian 8mb fast everything went smoothly

[Anemos]

my 4GB sandisk (2) partitions,on 2.5" adapter

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[gdhgdh]

Hm, I'll hijack this thread since it seems pointless to open a new one for an identical topic as I also have a SanDisk 4GB Ultra-II card, but am having problems getting it going on my A1200

HDToolbox from 3.1 detects an old 256MB CF card just fine, and lets me partition / reboot / format / install the OS..

However, when I add a new drive type and detect the 4GB card (yeh, "-176MB" as OP highlighted), create a single 80MB partition and 'Save Changes to Drive', HDToolBox hangs with the status set at 'Status: Changed' (I waited 20 minutes 'just in case')

The changes do not get saved as after a reboot, the drive is still unpartitioned.

I'm trying to get a copy of the 3.9 HDToolBox onto the machine to test it, but it's the usual fun of floppies. Have I done anything wrong in the meantime?

[gdhgdh]

Bums. Managed to get a HD booted that had OS 3.9 on it. HDToolbox from 3.9 sees the card more sensibly (fills in the model name / revision correctly as well as the size of 3.8G).

Alas pressing the 'Install' button just causes a busy-timer that never goes away =(

[thgill]

Have you checked your Max Transfer settings?

[gdhgdh]

yeh, the default is actually lower than the 0x1fe0000 suggested by illy above.

I was able to install OS3.9 using the device under WinUAE, and it is detected by my 1200. I can boot with no startup-sequence and do all the reading from disk that I want.. but as soon as I write a single file to disk, then the disk locks up.

I'll try setting a lower maxtransfer (0xffff or something equally low...)

[Spectre]

Hi folks, just been having similar problems to those reported here so thought I would post my 2p.

I've been using a usb cf reader under win vista x64 and trying to format a sandisk 4gb ultra2 card and install workbench 3.1. Using the latest winuae, every time I set up the partitions and workbench rebooted, the drives would then not appear in workbench to be formatted. I tried probably dozens of times and without knowingly doing anything different, I finally got workbench to recognise the partitions. However, they then wouldn't format and I got the "not a valid dos disk" nonsense. I tried various tweaks, obviously disableharddrivesafetycheck in winuae as administrator, tried the different maxtransfer settings suggested above, followed Killergorilla's guide to use sfs, tried reboots, reinserting the cf card, formatting the cf in windows with ntfs, fat, fat32 etc. Nothing would give me a working result.

This morning I've just tried again, but using my win xp pro sp3 drive. Worked first time, using ffs and quick formatting the partitions. I now have workbench 3.1 installed, ready to go into my miggy via cf-ide adapter.

In short, to anyone having trouble with hdtoolbox in winuae, try it under win xp rather than vista as there appears to be some kind of issue with vista releasing its drives properly to winuae.

[Toni Wilen]

In short, to anyone having trouble with hdtoolbox in winuae, try it under win xp rather than vista as there appears to be some kind of issue with vista releasing its drives properly to winuae.

I have done this many times with vista x64 and never had any problems. Probably another crappy Vista driver

[gdhgdh]

Well, I gave up on the nice SanDisk 4GB card and used the generic-brand 2GB I had in a digicam - it works perfectly if slowly (SysInfo just over 1MB/sec).

At least the digicam now writes its buffer more quickly..