Hi all,
Got an issue with writing a WinUAE HDD image to a CF card.
So basically for the last few years and on different systems like my A2000 with SCSI2SD or my A600 with CF to IDE adapter, I have been able to write and read a whole CF or SD card image to and from my PC. So I set the card up the way I like on the real machine, backup the card to my PC as a HDD image and it loads in WinUAE etc then if I wish to write it back I use Win32DiskImager to write the image back to the card. For quite some time ive had no problems with this and it always works on the real machine. Very convenient for backing up system drives.
So my problem. Recently I got an ACA500Plus for my A500 machine. I wrote out a 4GB HDD image of WB3.1 full of WHDLoad games etc like ive done with said A600 and A2000 machines, put the CF card in my ACA and sure enough it boots up and works to some degree. After running for a few minutes I start to get checksum errors and read/write errors on the drive. At first I thought it was because I had super high CPU speed of 41MHz selected but reimaging the CF once it goes corrupt and trying more sensible CPU speeds of 14MHz still yields the same results, a corrupt HDD. It gets that bad it eventually destroys the entire partition and I have to image and start all over again. Ive tried messing with the global settings CF PIO mode but I still get these issues.
As mentioned, ive been using this method on my A2000 with A2091 and SCSI2SC adapter and my A600 with IDE to CF arrangement for quite some time and those machines don't have a problem with the drives becoming corrupt on the real machine.
Interestingly enough, once the drive has checksum errors etc and I put the CF card in the reader on my PC and open the drive in WinUAE ie boot from the CF card live the exact same errors and issues present themselves running in WinUAE. It seems to suggest for some reason my ACA500 setup somehow is corrupting the drive when running.
Any ideas what might be going wrong here? Appreciate any suggestions.