Amiga 2000 A2091 SCSI2SD Prep Woes

[arongooch]

Hi all, in short I have an Amiga 2000 with a A2091 card with a new SCSI2SD adapter connected up. HDToolbox I can detect the device and the SD card of 4GB shows up no problems and I can partition it as required no problems. I originally had V6.6 ROM and found out the hard way that +1GB is not supported. As I have an EPROM writer I backed up the ROM's, found 7.0 and burned them to the existing EPROM's. No problems now, the machine fires and runs as expected.

Problem is if I format a partition over 1GB I get checksum errors from the drive! I can format the drives to say 2x 2GB partitions but if I put data on the drives like installing WB3.1.4, I get checksums and nothing will boot. The files are on the drive but the drive seems very unstable. Also If I make several <1GB partitions I still get problems with Checksums in WB or they won't show up on my PC in WinUAE, more on this below.

I then tried upgrading the file system using the PFS3-020 (I have a 2630 68030 card installed also) but still get checksum errors. I really don't know what is going wrong here? Ive tried other SD cards and all do the same thing. I hear in OS3.1.4 that the max transfer bug should now be gone correct?

I have been formatting the SDcard on the A2000 trying both FFS and PFS3 and putting the SDCard on my PC into WinUAE which detects it and allows me to copy files etc to it. In WinUAE the checksum issues don't seem to occur however.

I know this is another issue also, but in WinUAE I cannot see any more than the first boot partition, ie the other partitions don't show up or show up as corrupted/unformatted. Even when I use PFS3!

I've spent many years with a lot of success of using SCSI2SD adapters on previous A590 etc but this one has really got me stumped. Ive tried following tutorials and reading other forum posts but nothing seems to work. Any help or pointers would be greatly appreciated.

At the moment I have just one 990MB partition of the 4GB SDCard formatted as FFS and the machine runs beautifully. But I would love to make other partitions or have larger that 1GB drives.

[giZmo350]

I hear in OS3.1.4 that the max transfer bug should now be gone correct?

Addressing the above (I knew I should have saved the link!), and you may not believe this, but the Max Transfer bug is STILL THERE! I am quoting from ThoR's own post, I think on EAB, stating you must still set MaxTransfer to 1FE00. I'm not kidding either. It would be nice if a biggie blunder like that were made public across the major Amiga forums. Maybe Thomas will see this and weigh in on the post where he admits that the MT bug never got fixed in 3.1.4's current release. It's late or I would go search for the post - been looking but I can't find it now. 

In the mean time, try setting to 1FE00. Can't guarantee it will help but it's worth a try I suppose. Also, maybe Thomas will provide some pointers as you're using OS3.1.4. 

[arongooch]

Thanks for your help. Spent a few hours on this this morning and it now looks like it is all working correctly.

First of all, admittedly I completely screwed up with burning the ROM's on the A2091! lol I somehow burned back the 6.6 ROM's that I had initially backed up, one too many whiskeys last night I think.

With the correct 7.0 ROM's in I could format what seems proper partitions over 1GB in size and more than one partition would now show up in WinUAE correctly. So apparently with V6.6 ROM's it is still possible to format over 1GB and WB will format them without complaints and all would seem fine but it would seem this obviously causes issues.

But after all this the checksum errors will still present annoyingly enough. So I did exactly as you said and changed the max speed. I went with 1FE00 as you mentioned and sure enough no more checksum errors!! Some how perhaps this explains why the drives worked in WinUAE but didn't work on the A2000? Not sure but seems to have fixed everything. I now have the drive mostly full and everything is running great, no errors and all drives show up in WinUAE.

Thanks for the advice