Formatting compact flash card

[motorollin]

I've got a 512Mb compact flash card in an IDE flash drive connected directly to the motherboard of a 3.0 A1200. I tried installing it in HDToolBox, but got an error that it is not a disk type 7. I read that this has been fixed by a patch in HDToolBox, so I put the reader in my main A1200 with 3.9. I was then able to install the drive. I installed SFS in the bootblock because I didn't want to use the 3.9 FFS on a 3.0 machine. I formatted the partition and could see it on Workbench, so I put the card back in the 3.0 machine.

On the early startup screen of the 3.0 machine, I can see HD0. If I boot to a Workbench floppy, there is no HD0: icon. If I try to format HD0 I get an error that the object is not of the required type.

I thought I would try deleting the partition and recreating it under 3.0 now that the drive was installed. I could see it in HDToolBox, but when I tried to delete the partition the screen just flashed as if an error had occurred (though nothing came up), and the partition remained.

Any help appreciated as always :-)

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moto

[motorollin]

Just an update: a 256Mb CF card in the same reader works fine on the 3.0 machine.

I also tried the HDToolBox patch, but HDToolBox just hangs when I try to install the 512Mb card.

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moto

[motorollin]

Doobrey wrote:
A couple of days ago I stumbled across a page describing a similar problem with old Mac Powerbooks.
 It turned out to be the IDE driver thinking the CF card was an ATAPI device, but cos the driver was in ROM just like the Amiga, he built a little hardware hack to get around it.PB150 CF adapter.

That would tally with the HDToolBox error that the CF card is not a disk. I tried the HDToolBox patch from Aminet but as I said it just hangs when I try to partition it.

It's weird that it works on 3.9 but not 3.0. Could it be that I need the updated scsi.device from 3.1/3.9 to get this working?

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moto

[motorollin]

@Jabaruk1
Thanks! Where can I find RD Prep? I can't find it on Aminet  :-?

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moto

--EDIT
Oh it's ok I found it here. You can't find it by searching for rdprep, you have to search for rdp :roll: Can't wait to get home and try it!

[motorollin]

Yes I am replacing the hard drive. I wouldn't recommend doing this with a machine whose hard drive will be repeatedly re-written to, as CF cards have limited write cycles, after which they will degrade. The reason I am doing it is because this desktop A1200 is going to be used purely as a games console, so once the games are on there they shouldn't be written over.

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moto

[motorollin]

An extract from the Wikipedia entry on Flash Memory:

When compared to a hard disk drive, a further limitation is the fact that flash memory has a finite number of erase-write cycles, so that care has to be taken when moving hard-drive based applications, such as operating systems, to flash-memory based devices such as CompactFlash. This effect is partially offset by some chip firmware or filesystem drivers by counting the writes and dynamically remapping the blocks in order to spread the write operations between the sectors, or by write verification and remapping to spare sectors in case of write failure.

I don't think any of the Amiga filesystems can do this dynamic remapping when the block runs out of write cycles, so after a while if you keep rewriting the drive, then bad sectors will appear. But this takes 10s of thousands, or even millions, of rewrites, to happen, maybe even more with quality flash memory. For static data like games stored on a card it would be fine, but I wouldn't like to run an OS off of it!

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moto

[motorollin]

I have just tried RDPrep but it didn't work. I added DEVICE=SCSI.DEVICE as a tooltype in the icon, but it just says "No SCSI disks found". If I go in to HDToolBox it can see the drive there, but can't partition it :-(

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moto

[motorollin]

Still doesn't work :-(

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moto

[motorollin]

It's working now :-)

I still have another IDE flash drive, but it's a 3.5" one. I got a 2.5"-3.5" IDE cable, powered it off the floppy power connector, booted Install 3.0 off of DF1:, and lo and behold HDToolBox could create a partition. Formatted the partition and copied Workbench over and it boots!

Strangely, I then changed back to the 2.5" flash drive and it still works. So it appears to read existing partitions but not be able to create new ones.

Thanks for all the tips guys.

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moto