murple wrote:
I can turn up a zillion forum posts of varying usefulness on Google... is there a "how to" document somewhere about how to install on a CF IDE disk?
Right now the HD setup tool says I have no disk, trying a variety of CF cards on the adapter.
I was recently able to make this work. Here's my assessment of the situation. There's a bit or byte or some other thingy inside compact flash cards. This is capable of reporting that the CF card is either a "disk drive" or a "camera memory card". Upon receiving this information, some controllers consider it while others ignore it. And to make matters more confusing, some CF cards have it set one way, some the other way.
When putting a CF card into a windows machine through a USB adapter, this seems to be ignored and considered a camera flash card regardless. When attached to the IDE bus, I've read elsewhere that you need to have this set to "disk drive" in order to boot XP from it. This may be wrong though and I'm not sure about older versions of windows or other situations like scsi to ide bridges or something. I'm also not sure whether WinUAE will treat a USB CF card as an amiga hard drive, although I suspect it will.
It appears that the buddha board considers this flag and will ignore any CF card not set to "disk drive". From what you're describing, it sounds like the normal amiga ide controller in the 1200 et al does the same thing.
To make matters more confusing, sandisk up until recently provided a utility that would allow you to change this flag. But the CF card had to be attached to the ide bus to do this. I didn't have the correct adapter (i had a 2.5" ide adapter thingy) to attach the CF card to the ide bus of my desktop machine so I couldn't test whether changing the flag to "disk drive" worked. I hear it works great. That is if you can find the utility. Sandisk was making people sign NDAs to get it. Now it's not available from them at all. I got it from someone here. Not sure if it works with non-sandisk CF cards.
While at a local computer part store, I spied some 4gb cards from Kingston on sale ($13) and picked those up, but they didn't have the right adapter for me to plug the CF card into the PC ide bus.
As it turned out, the 4gb kingston cards worked the first try with the buddha and my 600, while the sandisk ultra II 2gb CF cards wouldn't work in the buddha at all. I didn't try them in the 600 since I don't have OS boot disks.
Since I still don't have the appropriate adapter, my bootable CF drive adventure stopped here. It's on the list though since I'd like to get a couple scsi to ide bridges and put CF hard drives in my mac quadra 700 and mac iifx. I also want to put one in a linux firewall I'm about to build.
Hope it's clear as mud now. :crazy:
brian
