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Amiga computer related discussion => Amiga Hardware Issues and discussion => Topic started by: giZmo350 on February 14, 2020, 01:38:36 AM
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Can I read an Amiga formatted CF in the PCMCIA slot on an A1200 (with an adapter of course)?
I dropped both CF0: and compactflash.device in DEVS but WB states it's uninitialized, which it's not. It's formatted with WB3.1
Do I need something else? Dang! I forgot. ::)
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The CF0: DOSDriver is configured to use fat95 by default, so if you plug in a card with FFS or such then it’ll fail with the behavior you described.
Is the CF card configured as a full disk? (i.e., with an RDB?)
If so, you might try GiggleDisk on compactflash.device to generate an appropriate mountlist.
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Also worth mentioning is the pickyness of the Amiga regarding the type or brand of the CF card. Some work, others might not.
Trancend and Sandisk and other industrial are known to work mostly.
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The CF0: DOSDriver is configured to use fat95 by default, so if you plug in a card with FFS or such then it’ll fail with the behavior you described.
Thanks for confirming Matt! Pretty sure I knew this at one time…. But thought I’d ask. I’ll definitely give GiggleDisk a try even though I have many easy options to transfer files.
Also worth mentioning is the pickyness of the Amiga regarding the type or brand of the CF card. Some work, others might not. Trancend and Sandisk and other industrial are known to work mostly.
Thanks for the reminder TribbleSmasher! I learned along time ago to only use Transcend or SanDisk. I also found out that there is a huge difference in reliability between two types of 4GB Transcend cards.
The ones with the burgundy stripe across the (back) top are rock solid every time.
(https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/51Wqcf%2BZfML._AC_UL200_SR200,200_.jpg)
The ones with the rainbow stripe across the (back) top are very prone to failure.
(https://ak1.ostkcdn.com/images/products/2896498/Transcend-4GB-133X-Compact-Flash-Memory-Card-P11062947a.jpg)
Got lucky a couple of years ago and found a seller on eBay that had 8 burgundy cards. I bought all 8 of them and still one of them was a rainbow striped card. It would not (quick ;) ) format at all.
Thanks again for the replies guyz!
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The CF0: DOSDriver is configured to use fat95 by default, so if you plug in a card with FFS or such then it’ll fail with the behavior you described.
Is the CF card configured as a full disk? (i.e., with an RDB?)
If so, you might try GiggleDisk on compactflash.device to generate an appropriate mountlist.
Does it have a GUI? I remember a CU Amiga coverdisk which had something called Upper Disk Tools and I think that could do the same thing, but had a GUI, but could also browse deleted files on working partitions as well and recover them. I'd forgotten all about it until now. I'll have to check out that GiggleDisk.
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problem I had was finding a CF card that would work & man did I try a lot of different brands so years ago I bought EasyADF from Amigakit that came with a compatible CF card and it’s been working great on my A1200 and various PC’s since then. Easy to use GUI too :)
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@ paul1981
Been a while since I used it, but I believe GiggleDisk is shell only.
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so... you can't boot from amiga formatted CF card in a PCMCIA CF card adapter?
do you have to do "prepcard" and prep as disk? i think i'll get one of these myself and have a play, as being able to splat a CF card in the side for some mass storage transfer or even boot would be very nice.
a mate of mine back in the day had an arcos "overdrive" box on the side of his A1200 with a stonking (for the time) 420meg drive. he would boot from it and good ol' sysinfo reported over 2megs a sec. according to BBoAH and amiga.resource - the overdrive "doesn't have any controller logic - it's just a ribbon cable coming straight off the pcmcia plug".
which would kind of make sense as both IDE and PCMCIA are similar as both are a basic adaption of the PC ISA slot spec.
looks like there were direct PCMCIA to IDE adapters, and even back the other way, IDE to PCMCIA adapters too!
google tells me there was some sort of effort with a basic PCMCIA to IDE adapter for netbooks, when they were a thing, to have some more drive and CD/DVD storage than just the invariable 32gig MMC onboard thing. looking for this adaptor now doesn't yield much...
also wiki on CF cards says it's 50 pin connector is a reduced adaptation of the PCMCIA 68pin, but still to the PCMCIA spec. so i am hopefull - if only to have those hopes crushed by the iron bar of reality...
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so... you can't boot from amiga formatted CF card in a PCMCIA CF card adapter?
I think you can do it with a custom kickstart.
You can use a compact flash to ide adapter and hook it up to the internal ide port & boot from that. This works because compact flash cards have a pin that controls whether it behaves like PCMCIA or IDE. The adapter just tells the card to pretend to be ide and adapts the pinouts.
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No, you can't boot from a regular CF card, at least not with current Kickstart versions. Maybe it will change with 3.2.
Only SRAM cards formatted as disk are able to boot from PCMCIA, unfortunately. They are fast, but small (2 or 4 megs) and expensive.