Using a Compact Flash card on a600/a1200 PCMCIA

[itsmedoofer]

Put the card in the PC and format again ensuring it is FAT32 and default settings, some cards come preformatted exfat which will not work.

[solarmon]

Originally Posted by DJ Gruby

I have been trying to access a FAT-formatted CF card in a PCMCIA slot of my Amiga 600 for a couple of days now without much luck. As I am feeling like hitting my head against the wall, I have decided to seek out help here before totally damaging my brain. So the situation is this:

The CF card is definitely working, I've tested it just a minute ago on my PC. Partition table type is set as "msdos".
It also used to work fine with my Amiga 600 a while ago, however I can't really tell what's changed in the meantime, as it's been such a long time since I've used it for the last time.
I have got all the needed software in the latest versions downloaded from Aminet and installed as prescribed:
- Copied cfd/devs/compactflash.device to DEVS:
- Have fat95 driver installed on my system in L:
- Added those extra bits with CardPatch and CardReset to my startup-sequence
- Installed CF0 description file into DEVSOSDrivers
- Mounted the drive by typing mount CF0:

And all of it for nothing. The CF card remains unrecognised by the system. It is reported as "Not a valid DOS disk", and the icon shows as CF0:NDOS.
It is also not possible to format such CF card on the Amiga side. First, "format" tool reports weird sizes (sometimes ~300 MB, sometimes ~450 MB, sometimes ~960 MB - even though the card actually is FAT-formatted as 1 GB). Then formatting breaks with the usual "Not a valid DOS disk" error message (the whole partition table gets totally broken by then).

Any ideas what and how could I debug the issue from here? Please note that the aforementioned "cfddebug" and "pcmciacheck" tools do not produce any human-readable output. They do produce some binary data that doesn't make any sense to me (looks like sometimes random, sometimes repeated byte sequences).

Any help would be highly appreciated!

What Kickstart do you have, and do you have any 8MB Fast memory expansion?

[DJ Gruby]

Originally Posted by solarmon

What Kickstart do you have, and do you have any 8MB Fast memory expansion?

Hi solarmon! Thank you very much for your response. I have Kickstart ROM 3.1 Version v40.063. I do have a 4 MB Fast RAM memory expansion, however removing it from the machine does not make any difference.

[DJ Gruby]

Originally Posted by fgh

You say the card worked on the amiga before. Was that via PCMCIA or IDE?

Hi fgh! It was the same PCMCIA slot.

[solarmon]

Originally Posted by DJ Gruby

Hi solarmon! Thank you very much for your response. I have Kickstart ROM 3.1 Version v40.063. I do have a 4 MB Fast RAM memory expansion, however removing it from the machine does not make any difference.

Kickstart 3.1 will disable the PCMCIA slot only if it finds 8MB of FAST RAM (in Zorro II address space).

If you only have 4MB of FAST RAM then the PCMCIA slot should be OK.

If you have a Gotek, or a way of writing an ADF to floppy disk, you can use my boot-cfd-fat95 boot disk to check if it works with that:

https://sites.google.com/one-n.co.uk...boot-cfd-fat95

[DJ Gruby]

Originally Posted by solarmon

If you have a Gotek, or a way of writing an ADF to floppy disk, you can use my boot-cfd-fat95 boot disk to check if it works with that:

https://sites.google.com/one-n.co.uk...boot-cfd-fat95

OK, thanks heaps! I will try it, and report back on the results soon!

[DJ Gruby]

All right, here comes my test report!

I first took "Boot-CFD-FAT95-v7.adf" and copied it over to my HDD. I booted my Amiga 600 from the HDD, and used "tsgui" to copy the ADF image over to a floppy disk. Then I booted up the machine from the "Boot-CFD-FAT95-v7" floppy disk.

The results are essentially the same as when booting the machine from the HDD. The device remains identified as "CF0:NDOS":



Then I used "PrepCard" to see the card's Product ID:



Not sure if it helps with further diagnosis, but here is the output from "WhichAmiga" utility:



And here is the output from "SIP":



Any suggestions on how to proceed from here would be highly appreciated!

[solarmon]

@DJ Gruby

According to my notes (on https://sites.google.com/one-n.co.uk...boot-cfd-fat95) if you get CF0:NDOS or CF0:Unitialized then that suggests the card is compatible but has not been formatted as FAT16 or FAT32.

Are you 100% sure that the CF card has been formatted as FAT16 and FAT32? Make sure the whole card is formatted as a single whole partition.

Otherwise, some CF cards are just not compatible, so try a different one.

[DJ Gruby]

Originally Posted by solarmon

Are you 100% sure that the CF card has been formatted as FAT16 and FAT32? Make sure the whole card is formatted as a single whole partition.

Yes, I am 100% sure about that. I am connecting the CF card to my PC at this very moment, just to be 100+% sure.

1. It is detected as /dev/sdd by the OS.

2. Mounting it with "mount /dev/sdd1 /mnt/amiga".

3. Looks all good: "ls /mnt/amiga" show the content written into the previously formatted card.

4. Let's double-check the file system type: "mount | grep sdd" tells it's a FAT partition indeed.

/dev/sdd1 on /mnt/amiga type vfat (rw,relatime,fmask=0022,dmask=0022,codepage=437,iocharset=ascii,shortname=mixed,errors=remount-ro)

5. Let's check the number of partitions: "fdisk -lu /dev/sdd" yep, there's just one!

Device     Boot Start     End Sectors   Size Id Type
/dev/sdd1        2048 2046239 2044192 998.1M  6 FAT16

It all looks good as far as I can tell.

[SPOD]

Is there somewhere you can buy a pretested CF Card & PCMCIA adapter? Really dont feel like blowing time and money buying several versions of each till one works.

[CCRider]

Originally Posted by SPOD

Is there somewhere you can buy a pretested CF Card & PCMCIA adapter? Really dont feel like blowing time and money buying several versions of each till one works.

https://amigastore.eu/en/165-compact...f-sandisk.html

[lesta_smsc]

Originally Posted by SPOD

Is there somewhere you can buy a pretested CF Card & PCMCIA adapter? Really dont feel like blowing time and money buying several versions of each till one works.

Yes. I believe RetroEZ sells them... he had them at Amiga Expo in Nottingham.

For the same reason as you have asked, these are tried and tested.

[Snoopy1234]

Originally Posted by itsmedoofer

Put the card in the PC and format again ensuring it is FAT32 and default settings, some cards come preformatted exfat which will not work.

Originally Posted by DJ Gruby

Yes, I am 100% sure about that. I am connecting the CF card to my PC at this very moment, just to be 100+% sure.

1. It is detected as /dev/sdd by the OS.

2. Mounting it with "mount /dev/sdd1 /mnt/amiga".

3. Looks all good: "ls /mnt/amiga" show the content written into the previously formatted card.

4. Let's double-check the file system type: "mount | grep sdd" tells it's a FAT partition indeed.

/dev/sdd1 on /mnt/amiga type vfat (rw,relatime,fmask=0022,dmask=0022,codepage=437,iocharset=ascii,shortname=mixed,errors=remount-ro)

5. Let's check the number of partitions: "fdisk -lu /dev/sdd" yep, there's just one!

Device     Boot Start     End Sectors   Size Id Type
/dev/sdd1        2048 2046239 2044192 998.1M  6 FAT16

It all looks good as far as I can tell.

As previously explained.

[SPOD]

Thanks guys, i'll order the PCMCIA adapter from AmigaStore. Gonna dive back into my 1200 and finish this album.

Anyone used one of these SDBox V2s? A worthy alternative? Do they use the same port as the Open Amiga Sampler?
https://amigastore.eu/en/825-sdbox-v2.html

[SPOD]

PCMCIA adapter arrived with a 16 gig CF card and it worked out of the box with the set up I did earlier for the cards that didn't work. It's only showing 2,966M free on the Amiga, can you get it to address the whole 16 gig?

[Daedalus]

What version of Workbench are you using? It might be simply an incorrect reading of the available space - older versions of Workbench (3.1 and before) don't calculate the free space correctly on large partitions.

[SPOD]

I'm on 3.1, can I upgrade to something higher via a software update, or do I need to burn eproms?

[fgh]

It can safely be ignored. It’s just the ‘free space counter’ that resets.
File system (Fat95) and driver (CFD) is what matters and they both have no problems with 16GB, even on KS 2.0.

[Jope]

And in case you want to upgrade anyway, both 3.1.4.x and 3.2.x will perform a software based ROM update on a 3.1 machine on cold boots, you just need to have enough RAM to hold the updated modules.

[Snoopy1234]

1.Your previous cf cards didn't get recognised because they were fat16 formatted I'd think. They need to be fat32 formatted

2. PCMCIA port is 4gb max cap iirc so maybe 16gb is folding it. Not sure if that's right tho.