a500 ide, compact flash, crossdos, winuae, HELP!@#

[kamiga]

I've got a dataflyer 500 ide controller on my A500.  I've also bought an IDE to compact flash adapter.  And I'm using a 1 gig Toshiba compact flash card.

SYBA SD-CF-IDE-A IDE to Compact Flash Adapter

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822998002

My Sandisk UltraII, Extreme III, and Extreme IV 2gb cards weren't recognized by the controller.  The 1 gig Toshiba bought from Sam's club works fine.

If I insert the PC-formatted card into the adapter before bootup, the amiga won't boot off the hard drive attached to the same chain.  I can, however, boot off the DataFlyer Installation floppy.  After going through the standard hard drive install software "DFPREP", it sets up the card and all is well.  I reboot, and the card is now a regular usable amiga disk.

I'm trying to use CrossDos 7.04 to have a FAT-formatted PC card, copy amiga files to the card, then pop the card out, insert it in a reader, and access the files from the PC.

Using "configdisk" on CrossDos, the installation goes ok, until I get a "disk that is in PCC: is not formatted, would you like to format it?" Selecting YES, "format did not complete, disk is not validated"  In either case (selecting yes, or no), I end up with a PCC icon on my desktop, and it can't be opened.

I also tried sticking with the amiga formatted compact flash card, copying files to the card, then ejecting it, and using my ide to compact flash adapter on my PC, and then trying to run WINUAE to mount it.  But this also doesn't work, although WINUAE sees the disk, I get a "Warning: The drive safety check is active.  Selected drive is not empty and non-RDB partitioned" message.

So I use hex workshop (nice hex editor for windows) to view the compact flash card, and I can't see a RDB within 16 blocks(or anywhere)

First 512 bytes: all 0x2A's
Second-Sixth 512 bytes: SLGE 0x534C4745 -- some four byte header starts off each sector.

[edit: these are definitely LSEG blocks with reverse-byte order SL->LS GE->EG]

I compared the format of the blocks with

http://lclevy.free.fr/adflib/adf_info.html#p6

Definitely LSEG.

Hrrmmm..... where's my PART, RDB, etc? Maybe stored on the primary boot hard drive?

I could really use some help on how to attack this.

Thanks

[kamiga]

Thanks for the super fast response.

I'm now seeing "Warning: The drive safety check has been disabled, and non-empty and non-RDB partitioned hard disk(s) were detected."

No disks appear on the Workbench screen.  (I'm assuming it should just show up.)

Thanks

[kamiga]

MozzerFan wrote:
Are you sure when you prepped the CF card, the filesystem was put in the RDB?
If not, you would have to use a mountfile to mount the card and see the partitions.

The dataflyer DFPREP utility has a stage called "writing RDB block."(from memory, i think that was the verbiage)

Is it possible this RDB block is stored on the primary hard drive, and not on the secondary card attached to the same chain?  IE is the RDB just on the boot drive, or located on all hard drives? Where is it located?

(i edited my original message.  I'm seeing LSEG blocks on the first 5-6 blocks of the CF card)

Thanks

[kamiga]

yaqube wrote:
I'm using a DataFlyer IDE controller with my A500+ and with SanDisk Ultra II 1 GB CF card. I had no issues with getting this card working, it was always recognized.

I tried a SanDisk Ultra II 2GB CF card, and it was simply not recognized.

The RDSK block occupies the 3rd sector. On a PC you should see a byte swapped header signature beginning with ASCII characters "DRKS". But this RDSK block is a fake of some kind, partition mount lists and autoboot code are stored elsewhere.

Weird.  I wasn't seeing it before in the hex editor while paging through the sectors, but I saved all sectors out to a file, and voila it's here now.  At offset hex 400.

 You should use proprietary command named SetAutoBoot to update any changes made to the drive.

Is this a dataflyer command or something? It sounds familiar but I'm not sure where I've seen it.

I see no possibility to use this card as a data transfer medium between a PC and your Amiga.

Do you mean THIS CARD, as in the Toshiba card, or are you talking about ANY compact flash card with this current setup?  Does this mean that moving physical drives over to the PC to use with WINUAE are also unlikely to work?

Which IDE to compact flash adapter are you using?

Thanks!

[kamiga]

I wanted to close this out with a solution.

I managed to get several things working from before:

1. The flash card works to transfer files.  Used linux dd with the conv=swab option to swap the bytes.  Flash card into a usb->card reader.  Recognized as a drive in linux.  After obtaining a complete image of the card, I transferred the image over to a Windows machine running latest WINUAE which opened it up and the contents completely accessible.

2. Two different hard drives, two different approaches.  One hard drive I used the same procedure as above, dd with conv=swab, and transfer to windows machine and mount with WINUAE.

3. Second hard drive, which was from 1994, kept aborting with an I/O error during the dd.  Fought with it awhile and finally gave up.  I used tsgui (which is awesome!!!) from within the amigaos to create an image of the harddrive which I actually stored on the other connected drive.  Mounted that hard drive in linux, dd with conv=swab.  Transfer image to Windows.  Mounted this file (RDF, RBF, whatever) in winuae, worked like a champ too.

Overall main problem with using the dataflyer was the byte swap.

Hope this helps someone

Thanks