Why cant I format my CF Card on a500+

[djos]

Hi all, I've been trying to get my a500+ to use a CF-HDD via my IDE68K v402 and I've tried 2 different adapters and CF cards and I can set them up using HD Toolbox but cant format them - Format just sits there forever and does nothing.

Im currently using an AmigaKit supplied CF-HDD adapter (for the 4000, I just changed the way it's powered and seems to work fine) with the supplied Kingston 4GB CF card and I've also tried a SanDisk 4GB card with the same results.

I havent tried setting up the Kingston card in WinUAE yet but for some reason this does not translate into a working HDD using the SanDisk CF Card. My Miggy appears to start booting and then does nothing and wont even boot from floppy unless I use the boot menu to disable the CF card.

I have been setting the max transfer to 0x1fe00 whenever partitioning the cards and this setting sticks no problems.

Any Idea's?

[djos]

Ok, I stumbled across this amazing post on EAB:

http://eab.abime.net/showthread.php?t=61666

Looks like I shouldn't be using the normal format option but the quick format option, I will see if that makes any difference tonight.

[Azryl]

Cool.. quite a good read, helped many years ago when I setup a 4gig cf card in my A1200.

Az

[djos]

Interesting, that worked and I can now boot both my CF Cards using both my CF-IDE Adapters (not at the same time of course) but it's painfully slow to startup, takes a good 4-5 mins?

[Rebel-CD32]

Did you format the drive with PFS3? FFS is painfully slow compared to PFS3, although I don't know why it would take a few minutes to boot up.

[paul1981]

Interesting, that worked and I can now boot both my CF Cards using both my CF-IDE Adapters (not at the same time of course) but it's painfully slow to startup, takes a good 4-5 mins?

Hmm, if that's FFS you're using then I suspect it was validating the disk... that would have made it take ages to boot. You can combat that with a "ValidateWait" like program such as this one:

http://aminet.net/package/util/cli/ValidateWait

If you're using any form of PFS or SFS then that was definitely not your problem as those filesystems don't have that issue.
So, after Workbench had finally appeared what was the speed like?

[djos]

I used FFS and yeah even after boot it's barely faster than a floppy drive.

I do have SFS on a floppy that amigakit provided but I've no idea how to install it?

[Rebel-CD32]

That extra-long boot time did remind me of the old disk validation, I can't think of anything else that would have caused such a long boot time. ValidateWait sounds good, but I seriously think the disk needs to be reformatted with PFS3 before too much goes on there.

[djos]

How do I install pfs3 and why use that instead of SFS?

[danbeaver]

I used FFS and yeah even after boot it's barely faster than a floppy drive.  I do have SFS on a floppy that amigakit provided but I've no idea how to install it?

There are literally manuals on the web on installing both SFS and PFS; keep in mind that you can recover files from a FFS based disk, due to the "overhead" it uses to protect data. Granted this slows it down.  Other things to consider, in the 3.1 KS ROM waiting for it to 'spin up?" If the IDE device is not buffered, you will have speed issues.  Look beyond the file system while you read the manuals.

[djos]

im just using GAYLE emulated IDE via an IDE68k v402 so i've no idea if it's buffered or not.

I must admit Im really thinking seriously about an ACA-500 + 12xx combo now. :p (it never ends)

[djos]

Looks like SFS and PFS require a 68020 so that rules them out, looks like Im stuck with FFS for now.

I wonder why it's so slow on my real miggy, using WinUAE and a 500+ HW profile (including 1mb chip & 8mb fast ram) it's very responsive by comparison.

[djos]

Found some info here:

http://eab.abime.net/showthread.php?p=731751

Going to try a 512MB System partition and complete reconfig from scratch in WinUAE first and see if it speeds things up in my a500+ (currently both partitions are 1.9GB).

EDIT: based on some info in that topic, I wonder if my IDE68k is faulty?

[Azryl]

Normally to help speed up a booting workbench you should add some extra buffers to the startup-sequence

addbuffers=30

should be seen at the top of the s/startup-sequence, beware that each buffer eats about 20kbytes of available ram.

az

[djos]

thanks, I'll try that - I'll add it after the autoaddram for my 8mb fast ram.