Help with IDE + CF card please :)

[waltermixxx]

Hi there i have an Atari STe with Alanh's ide interface on it...
I am having some luck, but I am having issues formatting a 4 gig card for use with it.
I also have a 32meg card and I could format it, but for the life of me i could not get it to autoboot...

for now, I will focus on the 32 meg card because at least i can partition it.
i am using AHDI .

first thing i do is boot from my AHDI disk in drive A, then run hdx, click Disk, then format, and say ok to all the warnings.
then it says formatting,.. but no action on the activity light on the CF card holder. (the red light is power, there is a green light for activity, and it wont light up when trying to format) on the screen it says Format a Physical Unit under that formatting, with the busy bee.
i can move the mouse but nothing ever happens:



nothing after that.

oddly enough if I reboot, boot from the AHDI disk, go back into HDX, and this time select Partition, Unit 0, total number of partitions 1
it's a 30.6 mbyte partition... i exit out after doing that, and the sytem reboots... i boot from the floppy still as there are not drivers on c yet...
and the c drive comes up... even though it was not formatted...



so I figure great... so i then go into the install folder to install the driver on the c: drive...
I select install from the file menu, then select c as the logical drive, click ok on the warning, then i get:

Cannot read root sector from the disk! try backing up the disk and reformatting it. and I click ok.
and that's as far as i get..



That is what happens with the 32meg CF card, i can partition it, but cannot format it... i can zero it as well... but cannot install the driver on it and make it bootable...
i am using an ste, with 2.06 or what ever the latest is on a 1040 ste (with 4 megs of ram) Any help or idiot's guide would be appreciated...

Cheers.

[spiny]

Unfortunatly, you can't auto-boot IDE devices on 1.62 (the TOS you have) - you need to upgrade to 2.06 for that, and it's not just a case of swapping chips :/

as for the formatting issues, grab the demo version of HDDriver: http://hddriver.seimet.de/en/ and see if that will format the card - it'll only allow you to create a really small partiton, as it's a demo version but should show if everything is setup OK. HDDriver is well worth the cash too, it'll also let you use the second IDE channel on the card.

[waltermixxx]

Unfortunatly, you can't auto-boot IDE devices on 1.62 (the TOS you have) - you need to upgrade to 2.06 for that, and it's not just a case of swapping chips :/

as for the formatting issues, grab the demo version of HDDriver: http://hddriver.seimet.de/en/ and see if that will format the card - it'll only allow you to create a really small partiton, as it's a demo version but should show if everything is setup OK. HDDriver is well worth the cash too, it'll also let you use the second IDE channel on the card.

Hi there, I appreciate the reply I am running the latest Tos. 2.06 so it should autoboot... and I did use the DHDrive for initial testing and formatting is dissabled in the demo... it did create a 512 k partition, but I dont think it was bootable either...i confirmed i do have tos 2.06 installed i ran sysinfo

[spiny]

weird, 2.06 should let you boot ok, though to be honest, my knowledge of AHDI is a bit poor, my STe with the IDE device on my desk at work ( yes, really ) so I can't test ADHI right now, sorry... I'm sure other more knowledgable types will be along soon though

[waltermixxx]

I appreciate your taking the time to reply
i will see what kind of luck i have with other hard drive drivers, there still a couple i need to try.

Cheers.