Amiga.org
Amiga computer related discussion => Amiga Hardware Issues and discussion => Topic started by: murple on March 13, 2009, 01:09:16 AM
-
I can turn up a zillion forum posts of varying usefulness on Google... is there a "how to" document somewhere about how to install on a CF IDE disk?
Right now the HD setup tool says I have no disk, trying a variety of CF cards on the adapter.
-
Started working with no obvious reasy why or why it didn't before. That said, a link to any FAQs/howtos on the topic might be helpful for myself and others. That or a hint as to what search terms to use on the amiga.org search... all the ones I tried turned up too much irrelevant stuff.
-
murple wrote:
I can turn up a zillion forum posts of varying usefulness on Google... is there a "how to" document somewhere about how to install on a CF IDE disk?
Right now the HD setup tool says I have no disk, trying a variety of CF cards on the adapter.
I was recently able to make this work. Here's my assessment of the situation. There's a bit or byte or some other thingy inside compact flash cards. This is capable of reporting that the CF card is either a "disk drive" or a "camera memory card". Upon receiving this information, some controllers consider it while others ignore it. And to make matters more confusing, some CF cards have it set one way, some the other way.
When putting a CF card into a windows machine through a USB adapter, this seems to be ignored and considered a camera flash card regardless. When attached to the IDE bus, I've read elsewhere that you need to have this set to "disk drive" in order to boot XP from it. This may be wrong though and I'm not sure about older versions of windows or other situations like scsi to ide bridges or something. I'm also not sure whether WinUAE will treat a USB CF card as an amiga hard drive, although I suspect it will.
It appears that the buddha board considers this flag and will ignore any CF card not set to "disk drive". From what you're describing, it sounds like the normal amiga ide controller in the 1200 et al does the same thing.
To make matters more confusing, sandisk up until recently provided a utility that would allow you to change this flag. But the CF card had to be attached to the ide bus to do this. I didn't have the correct adapter (i had a 2.5" ide adapter thingy) to attach the CF card to the ide bus of my desktop machine so I couldn't test whether changing the flag to "disk drive" worked. I hear it works great. That is if you can find the utility. Sandisk was making people sign NDAs to get it. Now it's not available from them at all. I got it from someone here. Not sure if it works with non-sandisk CF cards.
While at a local computer part store, I spied some 4gb cards from Kingston on sale ($13) and picked those up, but they didn't have the right adapter for me to plug the CF card into the PC ide bus.
As it turned out, the 4gb kingston cards worked the first try with the buddha and my 600, while the sandisk ultra II 2gb CF cards wouldn't work in the buddha at all. I didn't try them in the 600 since I don't have OS boot disks.
Since I still don't have the appropriate adapter, my bootable CF drive adventure stopped here. It's on the list though since I'd like to get a couple scsi to ide bridges and put CF hard drives in my mac quadra 700 and mac iifx. I also want to put one in a linux firewall I'm about to build.
Hope it's clear as mud now. :crazy:
brian
-
yes brian had some problems with my 1200 and scandisk ultra 11
2.0 gb works in pc as disk just wont show up onthe 1200 or my amiga 4000 just scans the ide bus stops for ages then reports nothing here .
chould u pm the file athough l can only have mine on the pc using usb card reader myself mind you at moment in the pc it treats it like removable disk so might make no diffrence :-)
-
Actually all I did to make it work was leave the room for a few minutes. The next time I powered on, it detected fine, I was able to install the OS, and it seems to be working great now.
I'm a Linux user and in that environment I don't think it matters how a CF card reports itself, it gets treated as a hard drive... so this bit you're referring to is news to me. I don't think its an issue for me though, I suspect it not working initially was just a fluke. Maybe the cable was bent at a bad angle, who knows.
FWIW I'm using a Kensington 4GB 133X CF card and a Creative I/O Ultra IDE to CF adapter, in case somebody is keeping a list of known working hardware.
-
I've had good luck with the Sandisk Ultra II (both versions), set up with WinUAE, or a real Amiga with a boot disk, hdinstools, and PFS3. I have encountered issues with an "Extreme III" 4GB card, but haven't yet figured out whether it's a compatibility issue, or a defective card.
If you run into problems, there's a huge thread at the EAB with lots of good info.
-
What OS version do you have? 3.1 and below AFAIK require patching of HDToolBox (http://aminet.net/package/disk/misc/HDToolBoxPatch).
-
Anyone tried the SD card to ide Adapters? will it work? SD card are even more small and cheaper.
-
Bamiga2002 wrote:
What OS version do you have? 3.1 and below AFAIK require patching of HDToolBox (http://aminet.net/package/disk/misc/HDToolBoxPatch).
I'm using 3.1 and the HDToolBox that comes with the original OS disks worked just fine without any patching.