CF-IDE HDD on A1200 - only 2 (out of 4) partitions visible!

[mingle]

Hi,

After mucking around with the 4GB CF card in the PCMCIA adapter (and failing to get it to be recognised in my A1200)

I've now installed it inside my machine using a CF-IDE adapter.

I booted from my original WB3.1 install floppy and used HDToolBox to partition the 4GB CF card as follows:

DH0: 150MB
DH1: 1000MB
DH2: 1000MB
DH3: 1000MB
DH4: 620MB

For each of the partitions I didn't change any of the parameters from the defaults, apart from setting the 'directory cache' flag.

Then I save the changes to the drive and rebooted from the WB3.1 Install floppy, but only the DH0: and DH1: partitions were visible from Workbench.

I did a clean install of WB3.1 and still no sign of the missing partitions.

When I looked in HDToolBox again, all 5 partitions appear to be there. When I used the "format" util (in the Workbench:System drawer) all 5 partitions show up, but when I try to format them I get a "no disk in drive" error.

Do I need to tinkering with any of teh advanced setting in HDToolBox (like maxtransfer and mask?) or could it be that my CF card is just not compatible - seems unlikely since it seems to run fine with the other two partitions...

Any help or comments appreciated!

Cheers,

Mike.

[mingle]

Hi Lloyd,

Once again, many thanks...

HDInstTools worked and all of my partitions are now visible!

The only problem I seem to have now is that the CF card is slower than the old 2.5" 4GB IBM Travelstar hard drive!

The card is a cheapy, but it's supposedly 'high-speed'. Anyway, I would expect that any CF card would be faster than an old HDD...

I did a quick test, copying the contents of my C drawer (95 files) from the Workbench partition to an empty partition...

Using the 4GB CF card it took 60 seconds to copy the 95 files.

Using the old hard disk it only took 16 seconds!

I tried changing the maxtransfer for all of the CF partitions to xFFFFFFF, but that completely mucked up the card, and I had to reformat it in my PC and start again (a minor problem).

The only difference I can see between the two drives is that the HDD was formatted "FFS Directory Cache", but the CF card was only "FFS International".

One other thing was that when I used HDInstTools, there was no file-system present on the CF card (in the RDB?). Do I need anything there - didn't seem to cause any problems when I was partitioning the drive though...

Any other way I can speed up the CF card using some of the setting when partitioning?

Cheers,

Mike.

[mingle]

Hi Lloyd,

Both the CF and HDD are set up with 30 buffers...

I did a bit of googling and found mention (on EAB) of setting the max transfer to 0x1FE00000, but that made no difference.

The max transfer you suggest is lower than that - is your's a better value?

I also tried setting interleaves (in the drive setup options) to "1" (was "0") which made no difference, but I was just clutching at straws!

SYSINFO shows 1.57MB/sec reads for the CF card and 2.8MB/sec for the IBM HDD...

I managed to put FFS on the RDB. I also had a quick go of SFS (but didn't set the optimum max transfer for it) and that boosted read/write times to be the same as the old HDD, but I'm a bit reluctant to use SFS, since it has a bit of a reputation for REALLY buggering-up partitions if you're not careful!

Finally, is there any benefit to using directory cache on a HDD/CF - it was mentioned that this is only really for floppy drives? I tried that too, but made no difference...

Cheers,

Mike.

[mingle]

Hi,

No luck with any of the maxtransfer settings. The speed is still the same...

I've tried other CF cards (8MB & 512MB) with the same result.

So it could be the CF adaptor? It was a cheapy, but I've seen the same used a few times:



Can you suggest a particular model that will work better?

Cheers,

Mike.

[mingle]

Hi Lloyd,

The block size I've been using is 512bytes (seems to be the default in HDInstTools).

I've been using 0x0001FFFE for max transfer on with both FFS and SFS... It seems to be fractionally (about 2%) quicker than when I use 0x0001FE00 - wow! :-)

With regards to SFS, I've never had much luck, although I'm using it now on the CF card. I was getting random lock-ups of the system and the SFS format command seems to crash quite a lot... Maybe it's just me?

Having said that, it's much faster (on the CF card) than FFS...

My setup is a KS3.1 A1200 with Blizzard 1230 IV (50MHz '030) and 32MB of FAST RAM...

I'd be interested if you could post some timings for you CF card setups... Maybe give SysInfo a go, although I think that uses some sort of raw reading of data, as there was no change at all when I used FFS or SFS...

Also, what type of CF-IDE adaptor are you using?

Cheers,

Mike.