Sandisk 30mb/s CF card compatibility

[jay]

Hi,
I bought two new 4gb Sandisk Ultra II 15mb CF cards from Amazon (can I write Amazon?).

They arrived today, but they have sent me two 4gb Sandisk Ultra 30mb/s cards

I sent them an email saying I aint a happy bunny and to arrange to get the actual cards I ordered.

Question is:
Do the Sandisk Ultra 30mb/s 200x cards work properly as a hard drive containing Classicwb FULL, WHDload, loadsa games, demo's and lots of music programs?
I ordered the Sandisk Ultra II 15mb/s especially because I know they work for definite, but do these work just as well? Someone told me they are not fully compatible with all WHDload games.
Thoughts?

This is using an A1200 w/ Blizzard 1230 mkIII 30/50, 32mb fastram and blizkicked into kickstart 3.1. ATM I'm using a 1gig Jessops brand CF HD which works perfectly.
p.s. I bought two so I can use the other with my pcmcia adapter (ATM I'm using a measly 32 mb one, hehe).
Thanks

 

[jay]

Ok,
I opened one to try it out in the pcmcia slot and as I figured it worked.. So I then tried it out as a HD:

This is all from memory now:
HDtoolbox would not read the info on my card.
It gave me an error to do with not being the correct device (device 7 or something).
After much googling I found someone with a Sandisk 4gb CF card that spelled out some cylinder and heads info, so I created a new device in HDtoolbox with those settings.
Upon continue I got a "too large" error. It worked but would not read the last partition.
I then kept getting memory errors upon exiting HDtoolbox.

Soooo I decided to install from winuae with sfs, following an online guide:
I got "harddrive: DH0: block zero write failed!" error.
After much googling later I used diskpart to clean.
Didn't change anything.. still got block zero error.

New tact; try HDInstTools.

Deep breath................

Right then... This is how to do it:

Download sfs.lha.
Download HDInstTools.lha.
In winuae, extract both lha's to my external CF card.
On Amiga (with other CF card inserted as HD) boot with ADF-Transfer-Kit floppy.
Insert external CF with both extracted lha's on it into pcmcia adapter.
Run HDInstTools.
Low and behold it recognises my Sandisk Ultra 30mb/s instantly and shows exactly the correct size!
Incidentally, the cylinders and heads values were completely different to the ones I'd found whilst googling when trying to install a new device with HDtoolbox.. see below.

Working HDInstTools values for 4gb Sandisk Ultra 30mb/s CF card:
Cylinders: 23319
Blocks per track: 336
Heads: 1
Block size: 512

I add the SmartFilesystem which works fine..
Create partitions.
All good, all gravy... sweeeeeeet

After installing ClassicWB FULL dopus would not start... I kept getting an error.... After more googling I realised I hadn't set the maxtransfer rate properly (even though some guides didn't mention the maxtransfer rate for HDInsttools -.-).
After setting it to 1fe00 for each partition dopus now works and everything looks fine and dandy.

So, the moral of this story is, don't use HDtoolbox, use HDInstTools.

Sorry to go on at first but it took me a good 5 hours messing about googling, etc when I could have just used HDInstTools and it would have worked..

Now I need to see if all my programs work properly... They seem to atm.

Put this info here for all people in the future that will find this helpful when doing their own google-mashing upon finding themselves in the same predicaments as I was in

 

[jvdbossc]

I never had any problem with any CF card. I use the hdinstools from aminet default, since I find Hdtoolbox on the 3.1 disks a strange buggy tool.

I think it depends on the used hardware adapter, since I recently had a problem with a cf card that worked with another hardware piece.

 

[Buzzfuzz]

Ok,
So, the moral of this story is, don't use HDtoolbox, use HDInstTools.

*Edited by SkydivinGirl. Buzzfuzz agrees that jay should use HDInstTools*

 

[jay]

*Edited by SkydivinGirl*

 

[Buzzfuzz]

I apologise, seems that I should have explained the links a bit more in detail.

 

[SkydivinGirl]

No problem Buzzfuzz. We know you were just trying to be helpful.

Take care,

Heather

 

[Retrograde]

Never having used the original WB partition tool back when, I found it confusing and actually didn't manage to split partitions in the way I wanted.
With HDinsttool it was so much easier.

While on topic, are there any pros/cons on using FFS vs. SFS on CF cards?

Looked around a bit on the Net but didn't turn up with much. I know the max transfer rate thing is pretty much essential for these "drives" (not having it set/set to max gave me write errors and hangs on my card after a while), but I'm using FFS atm. and considering switching over at some point. Hell just some generic explanation of how FFS and SFS work would be sweet too! (I found basic info on FFS but that's it, it seems to be a bit crude as file systems go these days)

 

[arnljot]

I don't remember all the FFS vs SFS/PFS3 stuff.

But for one, with the right patches SFS will support lager drives and files than FFS. Also it's faster and supposedly doesn't corrupt as easily as FFS incases of powerloss or crashes.

Also SFS may have a .recycle directory where deleted files might be found.

 

[Kin Hell]

@ jay

The WB HDTools Prep utility is fine for most devices, but I have seen it fail with 4Gb Hard drives before now. CF media is just another headache for HDToolbox.

I'm sure if you used HDToolbox under OS3.9, things would have been fine.

Buzzfuzz is right to recommend HDInstTools. In fact, most Amiga users prefer this program over HDToolbox from C= any day.

All the best.

Kin

 

[rkauer]

SFS is a bit more stable than FFS but have their own issue, like the fact you can't make parallel accesses (two applications taking data from the same partition at the same time).

Also SFS cannot be used in an Amiga with 68000 or 68010 CPU, only 020 onwards.

FFS, when properly prepared and formatted is very stable and only can be corrupted by a power loss during a writing. Big partitions are not recommendable just because of this.