PCMCIA CF Card is not recognised, but IS mounted as CF0

[Snowwie]

I recently bought:

- DeLock PCMCIA Adapter
- Platinum CompactFlash Card 2GB

...but for some reason WB3.1 does not see the card. I installed the drivers correctly, but CF0 won't show up.
On the other hand, CF0 appears to be mounted. I cannot access it, I cannot format it, I cannot unmount
it and Dopus says there is no disk in the drive. I have reinstalled WB3.1 so it cannot be any cd-rom driver.

This is a screen from my startup-sequence:


So what is going wrong? This stuff is all new to me (again), and I cannot determine what is going wrong here.

[Matt_H]

That looks like a stock startup-sequence - nothing special there, nor should there be. You've got CF0 in Devs:DOSDrivers, and the line after BindDrivers is what mounts it from there. But there must be something else missing that's preventing it from working, even if the device is technically mounted. You've got compactflash.device in Devs:? You also need fat95 in L:.

You may also want to put CardPatch and CardReset (see Aminet) right before SetPatch.

[Snowwie]

That looks like a stock startup-sequence - nothing special there, nor should there be. You've got CF0 in Devs:DOSDrivers, and the line after BindDrivers is what mounts it from there. But there must be something else missing that's preventing it from working, even if the device is technically mounted. You've got compactflash.device in Devs:? You also need fat95 in L:.

You may also want to put CardPatch and CardReset (see Aminet) right before SetPatch.

Compactflash.device is in DEVS and
Fat95 is in L.

I will try out those Aminet files, although it will be getting a pain in the neck to get anything to the Amiga because my floppy drive does not work on my pc and empty cd-roms are not available at this moment.

[Matt_H]

Hope you get your file transfer challenges solved soon!

In the meantime, did you see the Problems section of the readme file? There are some flags you can throw in the mountlist, maybe they can help?

[Snowwie]

Hope you get your file transfer challenges solved soon!

In the meantime, did you see the Problems section of the readme file? There are some flags you can throw in the mountlist, maybe they can help?

Please, understandable English.

Readme files with flags to be thrown in a mountlist. :angry::angry::angry:

[mfilos]

Just be sure that CF0 exists on your Devs/Dosdrivers drawer and NOT on Storage/Dosdrivers and report back.

[yssing]

Regarding filetransfer, you can always put your HD in a PC and mount it in WinUAE, that is how i did it initially to get my a1200 startet again.

[Snowwie]

I have managed to get Cardpatch and Cardreset to the Amiga (floppy drive in pc suddenly working again :laughing:) . Copied them to the C directory and added them in the Startup-Sequence. The Amiga wouldn't boot correctly anymore with those files, so I had to reinstall again.

[mfilos]

You certainly don't provide enough info!
What do you mean Amiga wouldn't boot correctly?

From what I can understand you just declared CardReset and CardPatch and you didn't have an PCMCIA adapter inserted upon boot... alas the system stalled.
Just for information, CardReset returns an error 10, when it doesn't find card inserted.
You can either bypass it by using a FailAt 11 or you can just output the error to NIL and be done with it.

So... the correct way to declare CardReset and CardPatch in Startup-Sequence are the following two:

Code: [Select]

FailAt 11
C:CardPatch
C:CardReset TICKS 50

...or...

Code: [Select]

C:CardPatch
Run >NIL: C:CardReset TICKS 50


[Snowwie]

You certainly don't provide enough info!
What do you mean Amiga wouldn't boot correctly?

Well, just as I said. After placing those two commands in the startup-sequence (and adding both files to C), the Amiga could not startup anymore. It stalled at the first lines from the startup-sequence I guess.

From what I can understand you just declared CardReset and CardPatch and you didn't have an PCMCIA adapter inserted upon boot... alas the system stalled.

The card reader was in the PCMCIA slot all the time.

So... the correct way to declare CardReset and CardPatch in Startup-Sequence are the following two:

Code: [Select]

FailAt 11
C:CardPatch
C:CardReset TICKS 50
...or...

This didn't do the trick either.

Another problem I have faced is that my internal CF Card has died on me. It gave me checksum errors and I was not able to install workbench on it again, neither was it possible to format the card. So I tried the 2GB Platinum card from the PCMCIA card reader, but this one was not recognized at all by the Workbench partition software. I guess the Platinum was not compatible with the Amiga.

The internal drive from Amigakit is a Kingston 4GB CF.
Some people say you can better use a Sandisk Ultra II or Extreme III.

[Matt_H]

Please, understandable English.

Readme files with flags to be thrown in a mountlist. :angry::angry::angry:

This is what I was referring to (from the readme file here):

Problems
========

If some trouble occurs, like cards not recognized by cfd, please:

* report exact hardware type.
* mount CF0: if not already done.
* insert that very card.
* wait at least 1 second (yes, honestly).
* take cfd/c/cfddebug and type into a shell

    cfddebug ram:cfdlog

* send me the binary file just created (about 4 kbytes).
  I promise there are no passwords and such in it.

In case there is another PCMCIA driver (eg. a network card driver)
blocking the card socket, try setting the CF0 mountlist entry "Flags" to

    Flags = 1    /* enable "cfd first" hack */

Damaged or simply not quite officially standardized cards may sometimes
cooperate using

    Flags = 2    /* skip invalid PCMCIA signature */

[Daedalus]

@Snowwie

A little late now I guess, but you probably didn't have to reinstall - holding down both mouse buttons when you power up gets you a special startup menu. Click boot with no startup sequence will get you a DOS prompt, and from there you can type "Ed S:Startup-sequence" to edit it and remove the offending lines.

As for it not working, it does look like the DOS Driver is installed correctly as you're getting a "No disk in drive" error, but it looks like your CF card and/or the adaptor just aren't 100% compatible with compactflash.device. I've found that with a CF card I had lying around. I haven't tried another yet...