Real A1200 ignores sfs/pfs3 formatted CF

[kabamaru]

Hello everyone,

I have an A1200 (Kickstart 3.1, 40.68) + Blizzard 1230 IV accelerator (32mb RAM) + 44-pin IDE to CF adapter + 4gb Compact Flash Card (Sandisk Ultra II). I used WinUAE to install ClassicWB on it.

My problem is that I want to use SFS or PFS3 filesystem but my Real Amiga only likes FFS. I've tried using SFS 1.84, SFS 1.279, PFS3_aio, (following the guides on Amiga forums). These all work fine under WinUAE, but my Amiga just ignores the disk and boots straight to Kickstart, unless I prepare the disk with regular FFS.

When booting from a Workbench floppy on the real Amiga, HDtoolBox detects the CF, but shows it as some unformatted scsi drive of "uknown type", and gives the usual CF error "unit is not a disk (type 7)" if you try to partition it.

My ultimate goal is to prepare an 8gb CF with ClassicWB and the full whdload collection (which I've already successfully done under WinUAE). That's the reason (apart from the performance gain) that I want to use a different filesystem. But I figured I should probably make the 4gb work, then go for the 8gb.

On a side note, is there a particular reason why Workbench/ClassicWB sees my CF card only when I choose the UAE HD controller? I never managed to use IDE0 and have the card recognized...

[kabamaru]

I've never done this - i've been meaning to - I think the solution is to have a small "boot" partition utilising FFS and then format the rest as your chosen file system. So long as the appropriate filesystem drivers are loaded in the boot partition I think you will be rocking.

Hi, thanks for your input :-)

Do you mean that booting from anything but FFS is unsupported? I just tried the two filesystems solution you suggested, here's the problem:

If I partition the card in WinUAE and copy ClassicWB, the Amiga doesn't recognize the partitions, so the card is useless. If I partition the card using the Amiga (using the workbench install disk), winuae doesn't see the partitions, so I can't copy the classicwb files. Maybe this incompatibility is due to the fact that WinUAE forces me to use the UAE hd controller, instead of plain IDE0 ?

[kabamaru]

there's a patch for HDToolbox...

YEEESSSSSSSS!!!!!!  :banana:

Oh man, you don't even know how many times I've entered those bloody hex numbers...

Thanks Crumb!

Make various partitions, don't use a single partition or you'll get in  trouble (I would make 3: one for WB (100MB), one for emergency boot  (100MB) and the third one taking up the rest for your stuff).

My setup is now 200MB for ClassicWB and the rest of the 8gb CF for games/demos/images and such (at first I didn't read that part of your post, that's how fast I went to look for HDToolBox_CF). What do you put in your emergency partition?

[kabamaru]

Use this tool to format your partitions too.

http://m68k.aminet.net/package/disk/misc/Format64-m1

Hi Nicholas, thanks. I went with PFS3_aio and pfsformat.

[kabamaru]

I have a small FFS partition with a plain WB3.1 on it for "emergency purposes".

You might want to try this: http://lilliput.amiga-projects.net/BetterWB.htm

Thanks Nicholas, I'd never heard of this one.