Amiga 500 : IDE hard drive (CF Card) issues

[Divarin]

Taking a long shot there that someone might have some answers but I'm pretty much at my wit's end.

For my (stock) Amiga 500, I would like to add some storage. I found and put together this: http://nuclear.mutantstargoat.com/hw/amiga/a500hdd/

The memory card I'm trying to use is a SanDisk 128mb card that I had been using in an XT-IDE card in an 5160.

I am not able to format the card. I reached out to the guy that created this project and he did try to help but ultimately couldn't figure out what was going wrong.

However after a lot of web searching I did stumble on this article: https://modelrail.otenko.com/c64amiga/formatting-an-ide-drive-for-use-in-an-amiga-500 which loked like it was going to answer all of my prayers as it explained why I was getting errors like "out of memory" and other issues. It also answered one nagging question I had which is "does the format utility automatically partition? Shouldn't I be needing to partition first and then format". Well according to this page, yes you do.

After a lot of attempts I was able to get right up to the finish line but then after formatting (so like it formats every sector but then) ... "Not a DOS disk in unit 0"

First I used a DOS program called WHATIDE which gave me the geometry of the CF card (980 sectors, 8 heads, 32 tracks per sector). Then following the instructions on the otenko.com link above the HDToolBox utility automatically detected the same geometry (good sign).
I partitioned the drive, set up the ide.ml file exactly as detailed in the article (using the numbers from my CF card), mounted it, formatted it. It formats and verifies each sector, and then right at the end the dialog comes up:

Not a DOS disk
in unit 0

BTW I have also tried a spinning IDE hard drive, an 8 GB Maxtor, but I couldn't get that to work either, but I figured that might just be due to the size.

If anyone has any ideas on why I would get this error after formatting please let me know even if it's just a hunch, right now I'll be happy to have a hunch.

 

[Divarin]

You know what I think I might know the issue, I'm using Kickstart 1.2 which I think predates compatibility with FFS (Fast Filesystem). I will try updating to 1.3.

 

[keithvcfed]

I'd try a few things: mix up the card you are using. I've found the generation of the CF card can matter. Not too old, not too new. Around 1GB seems to be the sweet spot. You can run out of memory formatting if your card/drive is too big. The format command does not fail gracefully when it runs out of memory.

Kickstart 1.3 will help, but support for HDDs improves beyond that even. Run the latest you can. 2.04? And use FFS for sure.

Are you running at least 1MB of ram?

Hope this helps.

 

[Divarin]

I'd try a few things: mix up the card you are using. I've found the generation of the CF card can matter. Not too old, not too new. Around 1GB seems to be the sweet spot. You can run out of memory formatting if your card/drive is too big. The format command does not fail gracefully when it runs out of memory.

Kickstart 1.3 will help, but support for HDDs improves beyond that even. Run the latest you can. 2.04? And use FFS for sure.

Are you running at least 1MB of ram?

Hope this helps.

Yeah this will be the 3rd card I've tried, I have a 4th on order (a 256mb SanDisk) This is the first one that would actually go through the format process. I did get out of memory errors with a 64gb card and my 8gb hard drive.

As for ram this is a bone-stock Amiga 500 except for an internal RGB2HDMI (which does nothing as far as ram is concerned) so nope just sitting at 512k at the moment.

 

[Divarin]

Well I got the Kickstart 1.3 rom installed okay and went through the process again but the result is the same, after formatting I still get "Not a DOS disk"