VA2000 SD Card Formatting Issue

[klx300r]

This is the mountlist from the instructions:

Code: [Select]

SD0:
   Device = mntsd.device
   Unit = 0
   Flags = 1
   Surfaces = 1                    <- Adjust to the number of Gigabytes you
   BlocksPerTrack = 1024              want to use on the card
   Reserved = 2
   Interleave = 0
   LowCyl = 2
   HighCyl = 1024
   Buffers = 32
   GlobVec = -1
   BufMemType = 1
   Mask = 0xFFFFFFFE
   MaxTransfer = 0x7FFFFFFF
   FileSystem = L:pfs3            <- Change to your filesystem of choice
   StackSize = 8192
   Mount = 1
#                                 <- Don't forget the closing hash mark
It is for a 512 MB card. How large is your card?

Also try to add

DosType = 0x444f5303

sooo I'm confused with the Surfaces=1 here....is the 1 relating to 1GB card size? so if I want to use 32GB the line should read: Surfaces=32 ??:confused: actually woudl any other figures on the list need to be changed

[Thomas]

The size of the partition is determined by HighCyl, LowCyl, BlocksPerTrack, Surfaces and BlockSize.

The formula is (HighCyl + 1- LowCyl) * BlocksPerTrack * Surfaces * BlockSize.

BlockSize usually defaults to 512. All other values can be changed to meet your requirements.

The given values result in a size of (1024 + 1 - 2) * 1024 * 1 * 512 = 536,346,624 Bytes a.k.a. 511.5 GB.

To make calculations easy I would use Surfaces = 2 and BlocksPerTrack = 1024, then one Cylinder is one MB and you can use HighCyl to adjust the partition size.

So for true 32 GB (= 34,359,738,368 Bytes) you would use HighCyl = 32768.

However, industry usually sells 32 GB cards with little more than 32,000,000,000 Bytes, so you should rather use  HighCyl = 30500 to stay within this limit.

So without knowing how many bytes your card really has, I would use these values which seem to be rather safe:

Surfaces = 2
BlocksPerTrack = 1024
HighCyl = 30500

[nicholas]

Yes, it's on my list of things to install now that I have a working CDROM drive in the Amiga (the old XP computer I had with a floppy quit on me.. makes transferring files to the Amiga extraordinarily difficult).

Get a cheap USB floppy from eBay to use on a PC/Mac, makes life with an Amiga much easier.

[klx300r]

@ Thomas

thanks again Thomas:drink:

[LooZee]

Sorry for digging up this old thread. Was this issue ever solved? It doesn't work for me either. I tried with several different SD cards, but it's just not working at all. The VA2000 seems to be abandoned in favor of the ZZ9000, but the mntsd.device is also used by other projects , so what is the secret to get this thing to work?

Could someone with a working card please post his Devs:DOSDrivers/SD0 file? Thanks!