VA2000 SD Card Formatting Issue

[Pat the Cat]

All good responses. However, AFAIK you generally can't format an Amiga partition until you've used HDToolbox to change the partition data and set an RDB on the drive, with the correct driver.device being used to access the drive. mntsd.device seems to be right one, that has to be in devs:

The instructions are a little bit weird, I would just save the file as "SD0" rather than "mountlist". That approach of having all different mountable devices in one text file called "mountlist" went out with WB 1.3.

Typically drives that don't work that way have their own utils and don't use standard format command.

Also be aware there was apparently release of new firmware for the VA2000 on the day you posted. https://www.generationamiga.com/2017/07/07/new-drivers-and-firmware-released-for-mnt-va2000/

The actual homepage gives an earlier release date in late June this year, but part of that does increase SD card compatibility, still marked as beta.

http://mntmn.com/va2000/

It might be worth updating before you do Thomas' test on the drive.

I also suspect your Maxtransfer is set too high (depends on what memory you are using for buffers) but that makes no difference to formatting. It can make a difference when you copy files to the drive and they get corrupted if they are larger than the buffer size.

[Pat the Cat]

Oh, it should work if you change the device name on the icon. So GVPSCSI.device rather than SCSI.DEVICE for your existing drive. And MNTSD.device for the current equipment.

(Select the icon for HDToolbox, select "Information" from the drop down menus).

More here, it's badged as for Amigados 3.x for large partition support, but should work very similarly for Kickstart / Workbench 2 and upwards.

http://www.pjhutchison.org/uae_hdtoolbox.html

After the right device driver has been selected, you should be able to read the geometry from the card, which should give you correct Cylinder, Head and Surfaces values.

One tip - I partition drives with a PC laptop to have small partitions 500MB-2GB at the start especially for Amiga boot partitions. But, I'm usually using classic / non upgraded AmigaDOS systems.

That way I've got something any Amiga should be able to boot from, regardless of how out of date the Kickstart and Workbench are.