VA2000 SD Card Formatting Issue

[Thomas]

This is the mountlist from the instructions:

Code: [Select]


SD0:
   Device = mntsd.device
   Unit = 0
   Flags = 1
   Surfaces = 1                    <- Adjust to the number of Gigabytes you
   BlocksPerTrack = 1024              want to use on the card
   Reserved = 2
   Interleave = 0
   LowCyl = 2
   HighCyl = 1024
   Buffers = 32
   GlobVec = -1
   BufMemType = 1
   Mask = 0xFFFFFFFE
   MaxTransfer = 0x7FFFFFFF
   FileSystem = L:pfs3            <- Change to your filesystem of choice
   StackSize = 8192
   Mount = 1
#                                 <- Don't forget the closing hash mark


It is for a 512 MB card. How large is your card?

Also try to add

DosType = 0x444f5303

[Thomas]

I wish there was a way to check to see if the SD card is recognized as being inserted by the VA2000.

Try this after mount SD0: http://thomas-rapp.homepage.t-online.de/downloads/hddreport.lha

since I don't have pfs

You can get it from there: http://aminet.net/package/disk/misc/PFS3_53

[Thomas]

The size of the partition is determined by HighCyl, LowCyl, BlocksPerTrack, Surfaces and BlockSize.

The formula is (HighCyl + 1- LowCyl) * BlocksPerTrack * Surfaces * BlockSize.

BlockSize usually defaults to 512. All other values can be changed to meet your requirements.

The given values result in a size of (1024 + 1 - 2) * 1024 * 1 * 512 = 536,346,624 Bytes a.k.a. 511.5 GB.

To make calculations easy I would use Surfaces = 2 and BlocksPerTrack = 1024, then one Cylinder is one MB and you can use HighCyl to adjust the partition size.

So for true 32 GB (= 34,359,738,368 Bytes) you would use HighCyl = 32768.

However, industry usually sells 32 GB cards with little more than 32,000,000,000 Bytes, so you should rather use  HighCyl = 30500 to stay within this limit.

So without knowing how many bytes your card really has, I would use these values which seem to be rather safe:

Surfaces = 2
BlocksPerTrack = 1024
HighCyl = 30500