Compact flash or Hd???

[Daedalus]

The disk those adaptors come with have some sort of driver (probably cfd.device) for the compact flash adaptor. By default the PCMCIA slot can only access cards up to 4MB in size, so the 4GB cards which are common won't work without the extra driver. (there's a little bit more to it than that, but you get the idea.) Install that driver on the hard drive of the Amiga and that'll do the trick. A 4MB expansion card in the underside slot of the Amiga shouldn't stop the PCMCIA slot from working, but if it does, you can always take it out temporarily. Once it's set up as a hard drive then, any IDE -> CF adaptor should work, just make sure it's the type for a 44-pin 2.5-inch IDE connector and not for the 40-pin 3.5-inch type.

http://www.amigakit.com have ones for sale which are sure to work...

[Daedalus]

Yep, Cammy beat me to it there... However, if you're gonna be using the CF card as a hard drive with the contents you put on via the adaptor, you don't need fat95 and you should install the CF using HDToolbox and a standard Amiga filesystem so it can be used natively.

Of course, then having a 2nd CF card formatted for the PC will make transferring between the two quite painless...

[Daedalus]

Thankyou for all your replies, I havent used HDToolbox before so fingers crossed that I don't make a mess of the job!

Well, once you use the correct device you can't really mess up that much, seeing as the CF is already blank and the worst that can happen is that you wipe it... So just make sure to set HDToolbox to use cfd.device in the tooltypes of its icon (I think it's DEVICE=cfd.device but could be wrong) and that should be it.

Two things to note though:

1) I haven't tried this myself so can't guarantee it will work.

2) Once you install the CF with an RDB and an Amiga filesystem, the Amiga thinks it's a hard drive and won't really like it if you try to remove it while it's still powered up. Best to switch off power before you take it out...