Classicamiga Forum Retro Edition
Thread: Kingston 4GB CF card problem
Harrison 12:15 9th June 2010
I've got a couple of Kingston 4GB CF memory cards and just got hold of some CF to IDE adapters for about £1 each from a Chinese ebay seller.

I know the adapters should work OK as many people are using the same adapters with their Amigas perfectly well. The problem I current have is not being able to get the Kingston CF cards to work properly.

Is anyone else using CF cards as an Amiga HDD, and have you used Kingston CF cards? The cards I have are the ones with the flower on the label.

The problems I've had started with partitioning. I've tried both on an Amiga with a CF card adapter, and in WinUAE using a USB card reader, and also even tried by connecting the CF card adapter to an external USB HDD enclosure. All have the same problems, so I think it is the CF cards themselves.

Using HDToolbox booted from a Workbench 3.1 install disk it can see the CF card and correctly ID its size. It also then let me partition it. But on rebooting the Amiga or WinUAE only the first partition can be seen by Workbench. On reloading HDToolbox all the partitions are correctly shown as still being there.

I then tried HDInstTool and that worked better at partitioning the CF card more easily. But on reboot the additional partitions still didn't appear. But HDInstTool has a feature to allow formatting of partitions inside the program, rather than having to use Workbench. So after doing this all the partitions then appeared and could be used.

After finally getting this to work I copied a WB3.1 disk onto the boot partition and the CF card successfully booted into Workbench via both WinUAE and on a real Amiga.

However, I then tried to copy ClassicWB into the CF card and it started throwing up loads of false checksum errors. I've read online that this can be due to the max transfer and mask settings for the partitions being too large, so I've tried reducing them to under 64KB, but it still doesn't help and the checksum errors still occur.

Anyone got any ideas?

Someone has also suggested I try patching HDToolbox on the Install 3.1 disk to update it and then try partitioning again with that. So I'm going to try that when I have time.

If anyone is using CF cards can you let me know the make and model, as I might consider getting a different make as I think the Kingston cards are the problem. I've heard Sandisk are meant to be the most successful make to use. Any truth in that?

For something that was quite a simple process, this has ended up being quite annoying. I've currently reverted to using the existing 6GB 2.5" IDE drive in the A600 again until I can get this to work.
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