CF Hard Drive Problems

I have been trying to set up a CF hard drive on an A1200 but am having a few problems. I have 2 CF cards and both have different problems, so firstly is there a particular type of CF card I should be looking out for or do any work with the correct setup?

The problems i'm getting are that one the cards is partitioned as a drive, no problem, reboot to format, partition not there.

The other one lets me partition and format, however I copy stuff onto it and reboot, I get read errors almost every time, or the partition is suddenly corrupt and unreadable.

Anybody have any experience with these things?

The best make of CF card to use is Sandisk. I have had loads of problems with Kingston disks, but never with Sandisk.

Next how are you setting up the CF card? The best way is on a PC using WinUAE. However you will first need to wipe any existing MBR from the memory card before going into HDToolbox to partition it for the Amiga.

Corrupt and unreadable could be due to a number of things. You have to see the correct transfer speed for the partitions or it will cause read/write errors. And also how are you partitioning the card? As standard Amigas can only use the first 4GB and each partition can be a max of 2GB. You can sometimes use up to 8GB but it isn't stable, and often anything over the first 4GB will wrap around back to the beginning and corrupt the card. However you can use larger drives/cards with a third party filesystem like SFS. I always make a 512MB boot partition and format with the Amiga's standard FFS. I then use SFS to format additional larger partitions after this.

I have a couple of tutorials on the wiki explaining how to setup a card with SFS filesystem. I also have a detailed tutorial on everything to do with setting of CF cards for the Amiga, and will be adding it to the wiki this week. Keep a lookout for it tomorrow when I will have time to add it for you.

Any chance of that guide Harrison, I may have some time over the weekend to play around with it!

The main guide that should help you is already on Amibay. You can find it:

http://www.amibay.com/showthread.php?t=19899

I've permission from the author to add it into the classicamiga wiki, but not had chance yet.

In addition, have a look at the following pages in our wiki which might give you some other useful information to help:

http://wiki.classicamiga.com/Install...B_or_larger%29
http://wiki.classicamiga.com/How_to_..._within_WinUAE

And some more guides can be found in the main section of the Wiki: http://wiki.classicamiga.com/Hardware

Hope some of that helps.