8GB CF card used as HD: should I change default settings?

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meduseld

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Hi all

Finally my quest to re-obtain a working 1200 is over, so I have got a converter for a CF card, and got a 8 GB CF from Sandisk (Ultra 2, which seems to be the one that works the best).

The 1200 has a accelerator card with a 030/50 and 32Mb of ram (I think is a blizzard; gotta double check), and I've got a CF to IDE adapter to replace the 80MB hard drive that was inside.

Now I'm aware of the OS limitations related to the partition size, and since I am using classicWB, with a 3.0 ROM, I've made 1 OS partition of 600Mb, and 4 Partition for the rest of the free space, keeping every partition under 1.8 Gb (ordered the 3.1 thou, so I can use 3.9 OS, which came with the Amiga that I've got, so it is the licensed CD, but the previous owner never did the ROM conversion so it was never used).

I've read somewhere on internet, that you need to change the default values of the card; because if you don't, you may get issues on file transfer...altho was an old post, so I am not sure if this is still valid

Should I change the TRANSFER value, in HDtoolbox, for each partition? The suggested value is 0001FE00, while I have whatever was set when I did the auto recognition of the drive parameters on HDTB.

Also if I have to change that value, do I loose the data already on the CF? I've already spent time to copy files on it, so I hope that it won't affect anything :)

Thanks in advance!
 
Thanks for the post; getting a bit of a better understanding now.

Also I've learned that is a bad idea to format the card in WinUAE; and much better to do it on the real amiga :)
 
meduseld said:
Also I've learned that is a bad idea to format the card in WinUAE; and much better to do it on the real amiga :)
Click to expand...

Please explain. (For example it does not make it a bad idea if you don't know how to configure matching HD setup)
 
Toni.Wilen said:
meduseld said:
Also I've learned that is a bad idea to format the card in WinUAE; and much better to do it on the real amiga :)
Click to expand...

Please explain. (For example it does not make it a bad idea if you don't know how to configure matching HD setup)
Click to expand...

Ok, in a nutshell: when you prep the card via UAE, you are not using something that a real amiga would like; in fact after spending 2 days putting stuff on the card; when I've put it in the real amiga, it would not recognize any partition.

Detailed: I followed these steps: removed the partition from the CF, left all free space; then I loaded Install disk on UAE, and I've used the hdtool to prep the drive and to make the partitions.
Basically the first step was to change one of the parameters in hdtool, so the emulator would recognize the drive, so I copied hdtool from install to ramdisk, and I've modified the scsi device parameter to be a uae device.

Once that I do so, hdtool was able to see the drive, so I did an auto setup using the drive parameters; created the partitions and formatted them (the wb partition was a full format, while the others were quick format). Each partition was under 2GB, while the WB partition was just 600mb, and set as first partition at the beginning of the disk.

Once I copied AOS on it and the rest of the software, I've put the card in the amiga, and at boot it would not even flash the hd light.

So I load the install floppy, and when I loaded hdtool, I have noticed that none of the partition were set, and that the drive was set as unknown; like if I never copied anything on it (and btw I clicked on the button to save the changes, just in case you are wondering....also I spent 2 days adding software, mods and games on the various partitions, so for sure it was working.

When I used hdtool on the real Amiga; I've noticed that the auto setup for the parameter was different from the one done in UAE; I've also got a message telling me that the total size was wrong, while on UAE I've got no message.
Altho this is normal, since the drive is 8GB and the FS is wrapping around, going to a negative value (I am aware of the FS limitation on 3.0 Rom, that's why I have ordered 3.1).

In the end, when I re-partitioned the drive on the Amiga and popped it in UAE, it was working fine, so unless there is a change to be made, when you move the CF card from UAE to Amiga, I think that I did everything as expected. So far the drive is working fine, not sure why it was not working when I did the procedure in UAE.

Hope that my description was exhaustive and useful
 
Thank you, that was better than I expected :)

I suspect that some Windows configurations (or something) don't actually read block zero when requested but has some offset if drive's first block contains something (Windows?) specific. (For example WinUAE thinks it writes to block zero but actually it is block zero + x)

Partition on real Amiga of course overwrites real block zero and allows WinUAE to access the real first block.

It would be interesting to see what you get if you partition new card under WinUAE (which transferred to real Amiga does not see any partitions) and dump first 1000 or so block under Amiga to file for comparison purposes.
 
If you plan to use the CF on a real Amiga it's a no brainier to partition the card first on the real Amiga, from the very first moment you know for sure your hardware is working on the Amiga before spending considerable time setting it up.
 
I find that this problem disappears if WinUAE is run as administrator. Then it seems to access the CF card correctly and it will boot in the real Amiga as well. Once it has been properly initialized either as admin or in the real Amiga, it can be prepared like normal even using a non-admin WinUAE.
 
demolition said:
I find that this problem disappears if WinUAE is run as administrator. Then it seems to access the CF card correctly and it will boot in the real Amiga as well. Once it has been properly initialized either as admin or in the real Amiga, it can be prepared like normal even using a non-admin WinUAE.
Click to expand...

Unfortunately it isn't that simple. Some systems don't allow any kind of access without administrator (and can still have this problem apparently), some allow access, some seems to allow access but don't actually write anything and so on..
 
Well, I'm sure it doesn't hurt to run WinUAE as admin when trying to prepare a CF card. The success rate is probably higher?
 
Glad that it helped Toni :) I will give a try to see what is in the first block of the card (block 0), as soon as I get a new flash card; ordered a couple so I can store everything, included the Aminet and other collections on CD (I am not planning yet to add the CD rom to the amiga, I have no space at the moment, until I will find a suitable slim case to do the desktop conversion).

Fitzsteve: I wish I knew it :) I assumed that an emulator would do things exactly 1:1, like on a real Amiga, but obviously even using the same configuration of the amiga that I have, and the same ROM and floppy images, I ended up having a problem.

Mistakes are what makes you learn after all :)

Demolition, not in my case: I run it always as admin (and I assume that you refer to win Vista or 7/8, since Xp does not have that problem...altho on xp I've discovered a whole new world of pain when I tried to use UAE on it :) ).

If you don't run it as admin, you will get a nasty message from UAE, telling you that you cannot write on the blocks where the MBR should go; same goes when you try to make partitions, but once you do that; you can write on the card without problems, even using non-admin privileges (I really miss working in unix environment...sudo and go) :)

BTW as update, I've changed the value of the transfer rate to the one suggested in another post (0X0001FE00), and somehow seems to go much faster, compared to the FFFFFFFF value that I had before. And no errors in read/write whatsoever!
 
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