4gb CF no longer boots up on a1200

[Thomas]

Whenever i mount my cf card as a hard-drive it says under it device name "n/a" and under volume "n/a"

That's how it should be. Why do you wonder?

[Thomas]

( if try to boot from the cf card in winuae i get a prompt saying "DH0: not recognised" or something like that.)

Can you describe this a little bit more detailed (with the exact error message).

[Thomas]

Well its not loading my cf card from the purple wb prompt now?!, but it does recognise it as device n/a, volume n/a, Path: multi Flash reader 1... R/W yes, Block size 512, Size 1927...

Try to run WinUAE as administrator (right-click and select "run as admin").

Should i try changing it from a uae device to a ide0 device, save that and then reload in my 1200 ide port?

Not sure why this should help. If WinUAE does not boot from the CF card, why do you think that the Amiga would? Especially because you started with WinUAE because the Amiga didn't boot any more.

[Thomas]

What does it say in the selection list when you click on add harddrive? Does it say [RDB], [MBR] or [unkn] and is the size correct?

Is the size correct after you used add harddrive? You said 1927... above. You can drag the vertical bar in the headline so that it does not say "..." any more. If it is a 4GB card it should say 3927 MB or 3.9 GB or something similar.

What does the card look like in Windows disk management? Is the size correct there?

[Thomas]

sorry thomas i am having probs with windows disk management - in that its not working (or constantly loading drives)

I would say that there is something wrong with your Windows then. Does it do this only while the CF card is connected or even without it?

Is this because it is recognised as being in 2 partitions rather than one 4gb partition?

How do you know that it's two partitions? You didn't mention this yet.

As this doesn't look like a straight forward fix, do you think i should just return the drive to the vendor for them to examine as it is only 3 months old ?

I am quite sure that he will connect it to his PC and try to initialize/format it for Windows and if it does not work, offer you a replacement. Both will mean that you loose all data. If you can accept this, it's probably the best (easiest) option.

I can't understand how using the cf card with a pcmcia adaptor into a pcmcia port has since ended its bootable capability as an ide cf hard drive.:confused:

Did you connect it while the Amiga was running? Perhaps there happend some kind of electric shock which destroyed something in the card.

Or FAT95 tried to "repair" something in the file system. I wonder anyway how you would have accessed the Amiga partitions on the PCMCIA adapter. You would have needed some kind of mounter utility which mounts the Amiga partitions on compactflash.device. It does not do this automatically.



If you still want to try to rescue it yourself, next thing to try would be to connect the CF card back to the Amiga's IDE port, boot with the Install3.1 floppy disk and run HDToolbox. Does it list the drive as "unknown" or does it still have a valid drive type?

If the former, which capacity does it recognise if you go to change drive type / define new / read configuration?

If the latter, does it still show the partitions?