16GB SanDisk Ultra - Problems setting it up/booting in WinUAE4

[Yulquen74]

Those CF cards seem to report non-standard CHS-value, HDInstTools in real amiga reports 111762 cyl / 280 blocks / 1 head, hence >15GB drive with unpatched scsi.device. Scsi.device is supposed to accept drives up to 128GB this way.

I used A1200 to set up the partitions covering the whole disk (PFS3aio), formatting all partitions, and copying a test-boot setup to all of them, and it boots ok, with all partitions visible.

But when inserting it into CF card reader, and adding it as a hard disk into WinUAE, it is recognized as a rdb disk, but maximum std.CHS values (16383/16/63), 8063.5MB / 15280MB). It wont boot with this geometry set, and if I try and insert manually the values reported by HDInstTools on the A1200, it says too many cyls and still do not work.

If I juggle the numbers around, it still wont work correctly, and at one point it attempted booting, but with the immediate pfs notification that TD64 and directscsi failed.

Is there a way to configure the CF card in WinUAE to act the same as on my A1200?

Thanks for any suggestions.

[Toni Wilen]

That is not real CHS value. Partitioning programs simply generate (at least hdinsttools) logical geometry using some algorithm, physical geometry does not exist (except when using floppies). And that is really stupid geometry value anyway because Cylinder number is over 65535, I guess hdinsttools simply got confused with very large values. Most likely it causes no harm. Unless actual partion(s) logical geometry also have cyl>65535 which would make it OS3.9+ (at least if using FFS) only compatible. HDToolBox should be more sane.

WinUAE can't detect real CHS values because none (at least none so far tested) CF adapters do not support ATA passthrough which is needed to read the required identity data. Some chipsets (mainly jmicron and realtek) have vendor specific commands that WinUAE supports.

You can use: http://www.winuae.net/files/b/idequery.zip to get real CHS geometry (only works in A600/A1200 IDE, must be master)

Option 1: find the real CHS geometry and tick manual geometry checkbox and type correct CHS geometry.

Option 2: Don't bother with IDE emulation and use UAE controller. Unless you really want all IDE specific side-effects emulated.

Note that "physical geometry" is irrelevant when using normal RDB partitioned drives. Except in case of A600/A1200/A4000 IDE where it causes nice side-effect of enabling "large" drives, but it does not really matter with SCSI or UAE controllers.

Hopefullly this wasn't too confusing

32G Sandisk CHS = 62041/16/63. So 16G probably is 31xxx/16/63 or something like that.

[Yulquen74]

Thanks, makes perfect sense, I suspected the HDInstTools CHS parameters was altered, but at least the product of the altered CHS parameters are the same as with the real values.

Your tool reported 31045/16/63, and when inserting it into drive parameters, it worked just fine, UAE controller also.

Out of curiosity: Which of the flags Last unit/Last TID/Last LUN has any relevance for IDE-disks? LUN if i remember correctly is for old SCSI stuff.

The reason I ask, if I add 2 CF cards via 2 CF adapters, using unit 0 and 1 of IDE emulation, only the partitions of the first one appear, although both disks are visible in HDInstTools.

If I try and clear the Last unit/Last LUN flags of the first CF card, save and reset, they are still set after reboot.

Is this (yet another) issue with HDInstTools?

This is not a problem though, if I add the second card using UAE device, the partitions all appear.