Formatting a CF card with FAT95

[motorollin]

I've got a 4GB CF card in a PCMCIA reader. I've got compactflash.device in DEVS:, fat95 in L: and CF0 in DEVS:DOSDrivers. When I mounted the device, I saw CF0:NDOS on Workbench. I formatted it, and the format hung on "initialising". So I took it out and formatted it on a Windows machine, which worked. But it wouldn't show up on the Amiga - it said no disk was inserted. I did a zero fill on the drive and it is now showing up as NDOS again, so I just wanted to check the best way to format it to make sure it works.

TIA

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moto

[mfilos]

Have you formated the drive as from Windows as Fat32 instead of NTFS which is the default?

[motorollin]

Yes it was formatted as FAT32, but I think formatting it on the Amiga borked it. Is it best to format it on a Windows machine before use on the Amiga?

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moto

[motorollin]

Ok, after zero-filling the CF card I connected it to the Amiga and it showed up as NDOS. I then took it out and plugged it in to a USB CF reader and plugged that in to an XP machine. I formatted the partition as FAT32, and then when I connected it to the Amiga it once again said that no disk was inserted :-(

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moto

[ZeBeeDee]

Try formatting it as standard FAT and not FAT32

[motorollin]

Just tried it as FAT rather than FAT32 and had the same problem - it doesn't recognise that a disk is inserted :-( Could it be that the card is incompatible?

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moto

[Thomas]

Ok, after zero-filling the CF card

If you format the CF card like a floppy disk, then Fat95 needs the exact geometry to be specified in its DosDriver (CF0 in your case), otherwise it will not detect the file system.

Fat95's automatic geometry recognistion does only works if the disk is partitioned (i.e. contains an MBR created by FDisk or the like).

I am not sure if you can partition a CF card with Windows' disk management. You probably have to fire up Linux and run its FDisk.

Whatever you do, you should first read Fat95's documentation. There is a lot of information in it. Especially note the section about the DosType and partition recognition.

Bye,
Thomas

[motorollin]

Thomas wrote:
If you format the CF card like a floppy disk, then Fat95 needs the exact geometry to be specified in its DosDriver (CF0 in your case), otherwise it will not detect the file system.

Ahh, so is that why it thinks no disk is inserted?

Thomas wrote:
Fat95's automatic geometry recognistion does only works if the disk is partitioned (i.e. contains an MBR created by FDisk or the like).

I am not sure if you can partition a CF card with Windows' disk management. You probably have to fire up Linux and run its FDisk.

Will Linux's FDisk allow me to create an MBR?

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moto

[amiga1260]

I have the same problem with a 4 GB CF card from A-data and Sandisk. The problem lies with the filesystem. The Compactflash disk driver only use Fat 16. Fat 16 has a limit of 2 GB and Fat 32 can cope 4 GB and above.

In other words. You can only use 2 GB CF cards with this driver.

[motorollin]

But I thought Fat95 supported FAT32?

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moto

[motorollin]

Well I'm assuming it was either the size of the card or the type of card. I swapped the 128MB card I had internally with the 4GB one I was trying to use in the PCMCIA adapter and the 128MB one, formatted on a Windows machine as FAT, worked fine with Fat95.

I have now got another problem which is that the 4GB card, now installed internally with Workbench 3.1 on it, is complaining of checksum errors. The boot partition is just over 500MB (about 509) and the next partition is just over 2000MB. The rest of the card is unused, so I'm fairly sure I have followed the rules for partition layout in 3.1. Can anyone confirm this? I'm using FFS.

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moto

[Thomas]

Reduce MaxTransfer for all partitions to 0xfe00.

Bye,
Thomas

[mfilos]

AFAIK Fat is limited to 2GB max per partition. That's why the small CF works just fine and the slightly over 2GB partition isn't working

[motorollin]

Thomas wrote:
Reduce MaxTransfer for all partitions to 0xfe00.

Thank you, I will try this when I get home. Do I need to delete the partition and re-create it, or is it good enough to change the MaxTransfer value and re-format the partition?

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moto

[motorollin]

mfilos wrote:
AFAIK Fat is limited to 2GB max per partition. That's why the small CF works just fine and the slightly over 2GB partition isn't working

I have checked the Fat95 documentation and as far as I can tell it does support FAT32. The 4GB card did not work even when formatted as FAT32.

The problem with the partition which is just over 2GB is not related to the FAT95 problem as that partition was used on the internal IDE interface and formatted as FFS. Hopefully Thomas is correct and this can be easily fixed by changing the MaxTransfer value.

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moto