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?