A dilemma transferring files to new hard drive...

[Oldsmobile_Mike]

Hi,

I think I've got this figured out already, but figured I'd toss my dilemma out there for if anyone else had any better suggestions.  

I've got a GVP Series II hard drive that has my current setup on it, not a lot of stuff, about 50 megs.
I've got a Mechware card reader and CF card that just arrived yesterday (W00t!)
I've got an external CD-R drive and a copy of the MakeCD application

Here's my dilemma - I want to transfer the contents of my current setup off my hard drive and onto the CF card in the Mechware reader.  I thought I could copy the files from my hard drive onto a CD, remove the current hard drive and install the card reader in it's place inside the GVP, config a minimal setup using OS disks and then just transfer my setup off the CD and back into place on the CF card.

Problem is, if I try to burn more than 2 MB worth of files at a time using MakeCD I get buffer underrun errors.  Application is only able to allocate about that much memory, and I've only got a 68010, so I figure it's a performance issue.  No burning CD's of more than 2 megs at a time for me with my slow hardware, it seems.  

So I was thinking of grabbing a cheap SCSI Zip drive off craigslist, writing all my files to that, swapping the hard drive for the CF, and then reading them back off the Zip drive.  I'm confident that will work, but was just curious if anyone has any better suggestions?  It's either that or burn the contents of my hard drive onto CDs, 2 megabytes at a time!  :p

Thanks!

[Oldsmobile_Mike]

Can't you just connect both the hard drive and CF reader at the same time? You'd just need an internal SCSI cable with more than 2 connectors, or an external enclosure.

Unfortunately don't have either of those.  I thought about pulling the CD drive enclosure apart and seeing if I could stick the card reader in there but it seems pretty proprietary.  Might still try it though!  ;-)

Don't really want to bother with floppy disks, I've got a ton of them but about 10-15% have failed with age, my luck the very last one in a backup set would be bad, if I tried it that way, LOL!

[Oldsmobile_Mike]

I've never burned a cd on an Amiga before, but maybe you could burn the cd in 2MB sessions?

I'm not too familiar with the software, but might poke around a bit more to see if this is an option.  It was my first time burning a CD on an Amiga, as well.  Surprisingly my test disk (with less than 2MB of files) was able to be read on my PC with no problems, filenames intact and everything.  I thought it would be the slowest burn in the world, but write speed actually ramped up from 0.3x to 6.7x during the process.  Ha!  

[Oldsmobile_Mike]

Aaaah!  Close, so close!

I went with option "take apart external CD drive and put the card reader in there to set it up".  After much cursing with tiny jumpers and termination I got the Amiga to boot and see the card reader as device 1 in the external case.  Was impressed that all the LUN's worked (just as Mechy said they would), I even threw an xD card from my camera in there and had it detect that.

Had some more problems getting the CF card to save it's settings, though.  HDToolbox partitioned the xD card just fine, but every time I partitioned the CF card and exited, it would loose it's partition info.  Finally (insert more cursing here) I got the CF card to save its settings by inserting it with the PCMCIA adapter instead of just into the CF slot.  seems like this would work out better anyway, since it's lower and doesn't stick out as far.

So I got the CF card partitioned, formatted SDHO: (figured I could rename it to DH0: once my old hard drive is removed), copied all my WB stuff over onto it, and can now boot off it.  It's rocking about 1,900KB/sec according to SysInfo, whereas my old HD barely topped a meg.  Impressive!

Only problem is I can't format SDH1: or SDH2:!  They're partitioned in HDToolbox, show up in the early start menu, I can even attempt to access them and format them with the Workbench Format command, but everything I do they come back "No disk in drive".  Argh!  I've deleted & recreated them, tried creating them as "bootable", my MaxTransfer is 0xFE00 on all three partitions, I've even tried re-formatting the card as FAT on my PC, making just one extra partition and sizing it under 2GB, etc.  I feel like I've geen pretty lucky to brute-force my way through getting this going, but can't seem to wrap my head around this part.  How do I get my extra two partitions to be format-able?

Thanks again!  

[Oldsmobile_Mike]

Even SysInfo is telling me "No disk inserted" for the other two partitions on my CF card.  I'd begin to suspect that maybe this card isn't 100% Amiga-compatible, if I hadn't seen it listed many times as being used on other Amigas.  :/

[Oldsmobile_Mike]

I've already tried the steps found in the bottom few posts here:

http://eab.abime.net/showthread.php?t=61666&page=2

and here:

http://eab.abime.net/showpost.php?p=715736&postcount=3

Without success.  Wiped the card, re-partitioned, still only my first partition was visible.  

[Oldsmobile_Mike]

Okay, sorry to keep commenting on my own thread, sometimes it helps me work through these tricky bits.  Also it helps when I'm working on things and it's *not* 3am, ha.  

For anyone who stumbles across this post in the future, I finally figured out a solution, which was to put the CF card in my PC and do a complete format on it.  Not a "quick format", but just a regular format as FAT.  Took about 10 minutes, after which I put the card back into my Amiga, re-partitioned it with HDToolbox, and then saw all three partitions show up on Workbench, ready to be formatted.  W00t!  

...Then came the fun part of getting the GVP to recognize the card reader as an internal device, which was a whole other headache.  Turns out the game switch, which I had initially removed to make room for the reader - which is longer than a standard hard drive - needs to be jumpered closed in order for the system to boot.  And there I was thinking it was a termination issue...  Bah!  But in any case, it's working now, and I feel fully qualified to help anyone else who ever tries to do this in the future, considering I must've had about every issue you can possibly have!