CF / SD and large drives FAQ

[fgh]

Are Kingston 8GB CF cards (with the flower on the front) suitable for Amiga CFHD usage? and is £11 a good price do you think for a brand new one?

Not a simple yes or no unfortunately.
I see from your signature that you have a cdrom in your a1200t.
If you use a third party IDE controller chances are that many CF cards (removable type cards to be precise) do not work unless you patch the drivers or use the True IDE controller from individual computers.

On top of that some cards are simply not working on amiga for unknown compatibility reasons.
The 4gb version of this card is known to not work over PCMCIA on amiga, but work on the onboard a1200 IDE. (Although some report having trouble with it over IDE as well)

The £11 price tag is fine but I'd rater follow the common recommendation and get a Sandisk card.

 

[-Acid-]

Ye mate im using an eyetech 4 way buffered interface, ive got two quite old hard drives in there and would like to replace them with cf drives.

 

[fgh]

As far as I know the Eyetech buffered interface comes with IDEfix drivers?
The correct IDEfix version with Doobrey's patch should allow removable type CF cards and a CDROM, but as I mentioned you're never guaranteed that a card will work as other incompatibilities exist. (Yet to be understood and documented).

Also, as scsi.device (ROM resident IDE driver) max drive size is 4GB, you need to either patch scsi.device (no size limit) or use PFS3 or SFS file systems with direct SCSI mode (max 7.8GB).

 

[fgh]

I also started a table with info on IDE driver compatibility some time ago.
Unfortunately, I will not have time to finish it soon, but I'll put it here if anyone else would like to contribute to it.

Edit: Moved to main post above.

 

[gazmoid]

Help, IDEFIX

Help, IDEFIX

Hi , I've an IDEFIX ( bought and paid for ) and have been having problems using my SANSDISK Compact Flash. I've tried doing the patch but have never made it work with the IDEFIX driver due to the removable disk problem.

Can someone help me with a working patched file ?
Gaz.

 

[fgh]

Does your computer hang/freeze when loading idefix?

 

[RicoSt]

I'm getting a strange problem with my CF to PCMCIA adapter.
I've installed everything and mounted CF0:

Now when I inserted the PCMCIA adapter WB doesn't display any extra drive.
When I try to acces CF0: from CLI it displays 'No disk in CF0:' for a second and than displays my CF0: card on the WB. After that everything works OK and I can access the files.

How do I get to display the CF0: device on my WB directly ?
So without first accessing CF0:

 

[fgh]

Updated the main post: Added table with IDE drivers and file systems limitations/compatibility, and made some minor modifications.

Edit:
RicoSt - Never heard of that one before.. I don't know, sorry.

 

[davideo]

@frodegh

Thread title edited as per PM.

Dave G

 

[fgh]

Thanks

 

[Firthy2002]

I'm getting a strange problem with my CF to PCMCIA adapter.
I've installed everything and mounted CF0:

Now when I inserted the PCMCIA adapter WB doesn't display any extra drive.
When I try to acces CF0: from CLI it displays 'No disk in CF0:' for a second and than displays my CF0: card on the WB. After that everything works OK and I can access the files.

How do I get to display the CF0: device on my WB directly ?
So without first accessing CF0:

Are you booting from another drive or direct from the CF?
Do you insert the CF after booting?

 

[djos]

Moved to it's own topic: https://www.amibay.com/showthread.php?p=411671#post411671

 

[-Acid-]

I have a CF to IDE adapter in my tower. I bought it so when the tower is closed I can access the CF card slot without opening it. When I have the CF card formatted with an Amiga file system and pop it in, the Amiga reads it on the scsi.device as it is seen as a hard drive and not a CF card. I wanted it this way as I did not want to use the pcmcia port for this as I want to add a network card to that at some point.

Anyway the question is, is it possible for me to mount Fat or Fat32 partitions this way? At present when I put a fat formatted card in, hdtoolbox doesn't see it but it does when I have a SFS card in the adapter. To simplify it, i'm basically asking can I put a fat formatted hard drive in the Amiga and read it as a normal hard disk?

So far I have found this http://aminet.net/package/disk/misc/msd95v16 and need to test it, but would prefer a solution where I simply put the card in and the OS could then access it for read and write without the need to be running any special apps to access it.

I could just stick with SFS formatted partitions on the card and use Winuae to access it on the pc but it's a pain in the arse. I'd rather be able to access fat partitions the same way as you can over pcmcia.

Is it possible?

 

[fgh]

Amiga partitions are defined in an RDB, FAT partitions are defined in an MBR, and HDToolbox only accesses/understands an RDB.

Yes you can set up FAT partitons and access them on the internal IDE controller, but you cannot boot from a FAT partition.
If you don't need bootable partitions, a FAT only card just needs a mountfile using scsi.device and FAT95 file system. (similar to CF0 mountfile, but with scsi.device)

For a bootable harddrive with FAT partitions you need both types on the same card, which is possible but not simple.
The RDB needs to be positioned after the MBR manually, and partitions defined carefully so they do not overlap.
And this is not done in one interface, you'll need a mountfile for the FAT partition, and hdtoolbox or similar for the RDB partitions.

Search EAB or google for "RDB and MBR on same card", and you'll find some guys that did this before.

Good luck

 

[-Acid-]

Hi that's good to hear. I do not need it to boot it's just working as a 2nd hard drive that I can remove without opening the tower to quickly move files to and from the PC etc. I've found MountDOS 1.2 on Aminet which says it does exactly what I want, so I will give that a try.

Thanks for your help.

 

[vacum]

Hello
I'm trying to install a SCSI drive in my a4000d.

This is what i have now:
*Amiga 4000D, 030 25MHz, Kickstart 3.1, 16MB RAM
*A bunch of 36GB 10K RPM drives (Old but working drives from servers)
*Phase 5 Fastlane Z3 SCSI card + cables and adaptors
*40 GB IDE drive with ClassicWB 3.1 or 20 GB IDE drive with OS 3.9
*DVD Player/CD Burner

At the moment i'm running ClassicWB Full 3.1 on the IDE drive but i want to run the system from one of the SCSI drives.
I have tried to install and partition the SCSI drives with lots of tools without success.

If i change disk to the 3.9 installation i can partition the disk but after a reboot it only finds the first partition. The partitions are visible in early boot. I can't format the partition. If i then boot ClassicWB i can't find the partitions.


I got the ClassicWB installation to work after lots of trial and error. I partitioned and formated the drive with 3.9 and then moved to my PC where i had a working ClassicWB installation that i copied to the IDE drive. I run IDEfix on this installation.

The 3.9 installation was on the 20 GB drive when i bought the machine. No idea what is installed on it.

I need some advice how to install the disk.
Clean install from floppys?
Upgrade to 3.9?
I was thinking about getting a patched kickstart with newer scsi.device but i think that it will only help when i use big IDE drives. The Z3 card is using z3scsi.device.

 

[Toni.Wilen]

*Phase 5 Fastlane Z3 SCSI card + cables and adaptors

If card's driver is not braindead, directscsi filesystem should bypass all limit restrictions when using proper scsi adapters.

Remember to use quick format! Full format bypasses filesystem.

 

[Dragonheart]

I'll add my current problem here as well.

I am trying to install my IDEfix97 software, but it hangs during installation where it says "AddIDEfixStartup". Did some research and learned that I have to apply Doobrey's IDEfix patch to the latest version of IDEfix provided by Elaborate Bytes. I've tried patching this thing for the past 1hr but every time it returns "wrong number of arguments".

Any help?

- I've downloaded the latest version of IDEfix (http://icomp.de/t/bin/eb_final.lha)
- Downloaded Doobrey's IDEfix patch (http://www.doobreynet.co.uk/amiga.html)
- Downloaded spatch (http://aminet.net/dev/misc/spatch.lha)
- Copied spatch to C
- Copied IDEfix from the icomp archive to RAM:
- Renamed it to IDEfix_old
- Copied IDEfix.pch from Doobrey's archive to RAM:
- Opened a new shell, changed active dir to RAM: and entered "spatch -oIDEFix -pIDEFix.pch IDEFix_old"
- ???
- wrong numer of arguments.

What am I doing wrong?

 

[fgh]

Vacuum:
As far as I know z3scsi.device does not support NSD so you´re limited to 4GB when using 3.1 or 3.9 FFS file system.
So get PFS3AiO, it will use directSCSI and all should be fine.
All you need to setup the scsi drive is hdtoolbox and PFS3AiO, so boot from floppy or either of the old drives as you wish.
Z3scsi.device is stored in the card, you just need to tell HDToolbox to use it. (Via commandline or tooltype).

Dragonheart: Try specifying the locations. (link)

 

[Dragonheart]

I've tried it with the full path, it didn't work :/