Formatting compact flash card

[motorollin]

I've got a 512Mb compact flash card in an IDE flash drive connected directly to the motherboard of a 3.0 A1200. I tried installing it in HDToolBox, but got an error that it is not a disk type 7. I read that this has been fixed by a patch in HDToolBox, so I put the reader in my main A1200 with 3.9. I was then able to install the drive. I installed SFS in the bootblock because I didn't want to use the 3.9 FFS on a 3.0 machine. I formatted the partition and could see it on Workbench, so I put the card back in the 3.0 machine.

On the early startup screen of the 3.0 machine, I can see HD0. If I boot to a Workbench floppy, there is no HD0: icon. If I try to format HD0 I get an error that the object is not of the required type.

I thought I would try deleting the partition and recreating it under 3.0 now that the drive was installed. I could see it in HDToolBox, but when I tried to delete the partition the screen just flashed as if an error had occurred (though nothing came up), and the partition remained.

Any help appreciated as always :-)

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moto

[motorollin]

Just an update: a 256Mb CF card in the same reader works fine on the 3.0 machine.

I also tried the HDToolBox patch, but HDToolBox just hangs when I try to install the 512Mb card.

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moto

[leirbag28]

Dude...you need to format it on a PC....not the Amiga.......its read on the Amiga Via the Amiga fat95 Filesysem which you need to download if you havent.


The ones you format on the Amiga are SRAM PCMCIA cards that only go up to 4mb on the Amiga.


Has anyone succesfully formatted a CF card on Amiga, thats NOT for use as an HD connected to the IDE port?  if so? why?  you lose compatibility with PC and mac which is what you might want it for....to swap Digicam pics and other files from PC's

[adolescent]

@leirbag28

Huh?  He's talking about using it on the IDE.  :crazy:

[Doobrey]

A couple of days ago I stumbled across a page describing a similar problem with old Mac Powerbooks.
 It turned out to be the IDE driver thinking the CF card was an ATAPI device, but cos the driver was in ROM just like the Amiga, he built a little hardware hack to get around it.PB150 CF adapter.

I doubt this is needed on the Amiga though, I'm using a 64mb CF card with WB3.0 and 3.0 ROMs in one of my A1200s, installed fine with HDToolbox..but then that's no help to you :-(

[leirbag28]

@adolescent


OOOOPS!!!!   Your right!  hahaha! :-D

[motorollin]

Doobrey wrote:
A couple of days ago I stumbled across a page describing a similar problem with old Mac Powerbooks.
 It turned out to be the IDE driver thinking the CF card was an ATAPI device, but cos the driver was in ROM just like the Amiga, he built a little hardware hack to get around it.PB150 CF adapter.

That would tally with the HDToolBox error that the CF card is not a disk. I tried the HDToolBox patch from Aminet but as I said it just hangs when I try to partition it.

It's weird that it works on 3.9 but not 3.0. Could it be that I need the updated scsi.device from 3.1/3.9 to get this working?

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moto

[Jabaruk1]

I had the same problem with a cheap flash card to get around this i used a disk prepare program called RD Prep which unlike HD tools found and formated the card with no problems.

[motorollin]

@Jabaruk1
Thanks! Where can I find RD Prep? I can't find it on Aminet  :-?

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moto

--EDIT
Oh it's ok I found it here. You can't find it by searching for rdprep, you have to search for rdp :roll: Can't wait to get home and try it!

[Oliver]

Hi.  I would be quite interested to see how this pans out.  Are you replacing the hard drive completely?  Mine is starting to fail sometimes.

[motorollin]

Yes I am replacing the hard drive. I wouldn't recommend doing this with a machine whose hard drive will be repeatedly re-written to, as CF cards have limited write cycles, after which they will degrade. The reason I am doing it is because this desktop A1200 is going to be used purely as a games console, so once the games are on there they shouldn't be written over.

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moto

[Oliver]

Cool, thanks a lot for the tip.

[motorollin]

An extract from the Wikipedia entry on Flash Memory:

When compared to a hard disk drive, a further limitation is the fact that flash memory has a finite number of erase-write cycles, so that care has to be taken when moving hard-drive based applications, such as operating systems, to flash-memory based devices such as CompactFlash. This effect is partially offset by some chip firmware or filesystem drivers by counting the writes and dynamically remapping the blocks in order to spread the write operations between the sectors, or by write verification and remapping to spare sectors in case of write failure.

I don't think any of the Amiga filesystems can do this dynamic remapping when the block runs out of write cycles, so after a while if you keep rewriting the drive, then bad sectors will appear. But this takes 10s of thousands, or even millions, of rewrites, to happen, maybe even more with quality flash memory. For static data like games stored on a card it would be fine, but I wouldn't like to run an OS off of it!

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moto

[Jabaruk1]

RDprep is on aminet errr disk/misc/rdp391.lha  i think

[mfilos]

Didn't have any problem preparing my 256MB Sandisk CF card via HDToolbox. I formated afterward with FFS and using it in OS 3.9 like a charm!
I also tried to boot with it and runs prefectly.
I can't see why it doesn't runs on you.

P.S. I'm using an IDE to CF adaptor by the way