Catweasel MK 4????????

[Fester]

I hate to bring back and old thread, but I have difficulty with a newly purchased MK4.

Has anyone been able to use it under Windows XP WinUAE 1.4.5?

I followed the instructions from the WinUAE website. The cat: is automatically mounted when I boot up but it doesn't do anything!

I insert an empty ADF image in DF0: and an Amiga disk in my A drive. I write "Diskcopy CAT: to DF0: noverify" command in a shell and I press ENTER. It takes the command, no error messages appear, but no disk activity takes place.

??

[Fester]

redrumloa wrote:
Wow, I see this is a resurrected old thread.  :-o

Yeah. Well... I must be a retard. :-)

I'm having trouble getting it going. It was throwing back bad sector 0 errorswhen I tried to read amiga disks using ImageTool 2.3.

I figured I either had an incompatible floppy drive so I swapped it for an Amiga 2000 floppy drive. Same results.

I reconnected the Sony floppy and futzed around with the flat cables. Now, the PC can see drive A and write to it, but the computer won't recognize the pci catweasel mk4 even though I removed the drivers, un-installed the hardware from control panel and rebooted.

Still at it. I think if I ever get this going, I'll write a faq in English and in French and include pictures and take a trip to Florida just to calm my nerves.

[Fester]

redrumloa wrote:
You are using the latest drivers?

I'm using the drivers from April 2007. I think those are the latest.

Im using ImageTool 2.3 Hotfix.

I got the darn thing working now. The problem was with the flat cables.

When I installed the Catweasel MK4, I simply used the floppy cable that was already in the pc: I unplugged the cable from the mother board and plugged it into the black connector on the MK4. That's what the Catweasel's short version manual says to do.

To solve the problem, I removed the original floppy cable from my PC and used the ones provided with the Catweasel.

1. Connected the cat's white connector to the motherboard using the cable with the white connector.

2. Connected the cat's black connector to my Sony 3.5" floppy drive using the 3 connector flat cable. The 3 connector cable's twisted end connects to the floppy with pin 1 (red) on the drive's pin 1. The other end goes to the black connector on the cat with pin 1 (red) facing upward, that is, away from the motherboard. The middle connector on the 3 connector flat cable is not used.

3. I then removed all old cat drivers from Windows XP. (windows/System32/Drivers/cat*)

4. I also un-installed anything related to Individual Computers from my Windows control panel hardware list.

5. Shut down the pc completely, waited 20 seconds and rebooted.

6. Got the pc to start re-installing the latest drivers from april 2007.

Once that was all done, I did an imagetool read/write test with PC floppies. The Imagetool's "Detect" function worked instantly, recognizing my pc floppies. I copied a disk to the buffer without errors and was able to write it back to a new floppy.

Then, I tried the "Detect" function on an Amiga DD disk. It also worked perfectly.

I launched Amiga OS 3.5 on WinUAE 1.4.5 and tried to copy the amiga floppy in device cat:. Sure thing, that worked great too.

I tried another disk but it had a bad sector. Interestingly enough, that killed the diskcopy from cat: but then the Cat: device showed up in Workbench as a diskette icon. I copied the files that I could using "copy cat: to df0: ALL FORCE".

So I am pretty happy at the moment.

The only thing I haven't tried is to actually make an ADF from the ImageTool. I'll give that a go shortly.

Fester

[Fester]

Hi Stainy,

At first, I too had grinding noises coming from the MK4, bizarre drive selections such as your 5.25" and the like.

It seems my biggest problem was cabling. I was using the floppy cable that was originally supplied in the PC. Secondly, I had connected the cables upside down. After using the cables supplied with the MK4 and finally plugging them upside right, everything worked fine.

1. I can now auto detect PC floppies and copy them.

2. I can now auto-detect Amiga diskettes, and read/write ADFs.

3. My WinUAE CAT: device works fine too. I can use it to diskcopy or to copy files, although this is by far the slowest. The device doesn't seem to show up on the workbench until to call it up once in a shell window. No big deal.

As far as drivers are concerned, I tried several versions. The one I'm using now is the one from April 2007 and the Imagetool 2.3 hotfix.

Try the latest drivers as suggested by redrumloa. Also tinker with your cables. Make sure they're connected correctly. Try using the cable supplied with the MK4 instead of any other cables you might have been using.

Let me know if that helps at all. I will have to test the MK4 a bit more to feel comfortable with it. I've tried several Amiga diskettes and it looks like 8 out of the 10 I tried were corrupt. Couldn't read them. I'm going to pull out my old 2000s from storage to see if those 8 diskettes are actually corrupt or not.

[Fester]

Stainy wrote:

Thanks for your suggestions.. I`m using the latest drivers.. I will have a fiddle with the cables..although I am using them as per the manual... original floppy cable and the teo headed one!  I`m guessing the three headed cable in the box isn`t used because it`s assuming you have that one already in your pc..
But I will try

The original cable in my pc does NOT work with the mk4. I finally tried the 3 connector cable supplied with the mk4. This might also be part of the problem in your setup.

Stainy wrote:

Also I remember before when I had a CW and had it working in Winuae.. I had to mount CAT in shell before it would pull up a disk  :-o

[/quote]

Mine is automatically mounted. My cat device setup is in dh0:devs/dosdrivers/ and my default startup-sequence included the following lines:

BindDrivers
C:Mount >NIL: DEVS:DOSDrivers/~(#?.info)

So when I type "mount cat:" in a shell window, I get the message that the cat is already mounted. Also, if I type "cat:", the device's icon appears on the workbench. It's not there by default when I boot up even though the cat is mounted. No big deal. I can live with that.

[Fester]

jalister wrote:
I see you can read Amiga disks in WinUAE using your Catweasel. I just got an MK4, and it works well. I am having one problem though. When I try to use the Catweasel in WinUAE to access CAT: I get the error "Not a DOS disk in device CAT". Any ideas?

Imagetool 2.3 has worked perfectly. I've tried the April and September drivers. I have also done the steps you have listed here, as best as I can tell.

Thanks.

Hi jalister,

I got the same error as you did but if I remember correctly, I wasn't able to make an ADF with the imagetool at that time. My cables were not connected correctly.

I'd check the cat device's file in devs/dosdrivers. See if the unit and flag is set to correct values.

I am using the last connector on the 3 connector cable so imagetool opens up with Unit 2 by default. (I assume that's the reason why). At any rate, I had to set the unit and flag in the cat file as shown below:

Device = multidisk.device
Unit = 1
Flags = 0
Surfaces = 2
BlocksPerTrack = 11
Reserved = 2
mask = 0x7ffffffc
MaxTransfer = 0x00200000
Interleave  = 0
LowCyl = 0
HighCyl = 79
Buffers = 5
BufMemType = 0
StackSize = 4096
Priority = 5
GlobVec = -1

Hope this helps.

[Fester]

zhulien wrote:
boy, am I glad this thread was ressurected!  if it weren't I wouldn't have known how bad this product was and would have bought it!  I was looking at it purely for C64 discs, but from this thread it seems no-one's got it working for this - perhaps Individual should fix their advertising up to mention the fact it doesn't really work as advertised?

Well it works reasonably well for me. I can do the things I purchased it for. Plus, I have a couple of those old command control joysticks connected to it.

Browsing the Internet, it seems people all have the same problems with this Catweasel. Same errors keep appearing in forums. Seems it's either the drivers or the cables. But I'm not into C64 so I don't know anything about that aspect.