Divarin
Veteran Member
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.
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.