Cannot boot from CF card after installing 12.00

[TheNameOfTheGame]

I was using 10.18 on my falcon with a 2GB cf card (4 512mb partitions).

After installing 12.00 to C the card will not boot. It gives a row of bombs on the screen after the memory test. Even if I put the hddriver disk in the floppy and try to boot that with the card installed it bombs out now.

I tried with another card that also had 10.18 on it and it also stopped working after 12.00 was installed. But that card allowed me to boot with the floppy drive to install the driver so I could save the files there via uip. After re-partitioning that card with the 12.00 hddrutil and installing the driver it will boot that one now, albeit I have to reinstall all the files.

What can I do to get the first card working again if it bombs even when booting off of floppy?

[uweseimet]

Is this a stock Falcon or has the Falcon's hardware been modified in any way? In case you also have HDDRIVER 11: Is this issue also present with HDDRIVER 11? In case your Falcon has some kind of RAM expansion that provides alternate RAM please ensure that you did not enable HDDRUTIL's option for installing HDDRIVER 11 or 12 in TT-RAM. This only works if you have real TT RAM, i.e. only with a TT. (According to a user report it also works with the Milan.)

In case the hints above do not resolve your issue please send me an image file of a (small) CF card with this issue and HDDRIVER 12 installed by email, so that I can try to reproduce the problem on a real Falcon or with Hatari. If possible, please verify that the image file crashes with Hatari just like it crashes with a real Falcon.

[TheNameOfTheGame]

Is this a stock Falcon or has the Falcon's hardware been modified in any way? In case you also have HDDRIVER 11: Is this issue also present with HDDRIVER 11? In case your Falcon has some kind of RAM expansion that provides alternate RAM please ensure that you did not enable HDDRUTIL's option for installing HDDRIVER 11 or 12 in TT-RAM. This only works if you have real TT RAM, i.e. only with a TT. (According to a user report it also works with the Milan.)

In case the hints above do not resolve your issue please send me an image file of a (small) CF card with this issue and HDDRIVER 12 installed by email, so that I can try to reproduce the problem on a real Falcon or with Hatari. If possible, please verify that the image file crashes with Hatari just like it crashes with a real Falcon.

Hello. The Falcon has a CT63 in it but it was in 030 mode for the driver update. No other modifications. I didn't install 11 on it so can't speak to that. No RAM expansion either - just normal 14MB card.

I will try with Hatari if I can get an image file from the card. Thanks for the help.

[uweseimet]

An image file and the information whether you have the same issue with HDDRIVER 11 would definitely be helpful. You can create an image file from a memory card based on the instructions on the demo version page, just swap the source and destination devices/filenames (e.g. if/of when using dd).
The next step I recommend is to try the resulting image file with Hatari in Falcon mode and a plain TOS 4.04, in order to see whether the CT63 is somehow involved. So far there are no open issues related to booting HDDRIVER 11 or 12 with a Falcon. I do not know, though, how many HDDRIVER users have a CT63 installed.

[TheNameOfTheGame]

After imaging the falcon cf card, it bombs on hatari like it does on real hardware.

The demo image of HDDRIVER12 works fine under hatari here so no problem there.

I sent you a small file with the start of the cf card image. Maybe you could see something wrong there?

[uweseimet]

Yes, something is wrong, indeed: The HDDRIVER.SYS file on your image is damaged somewhere in the first bytes. The Pure C debugger (after renaming the file to HDDRIVER.PRG so that the debugger can load it) reports that the binary is not a valid executable (Bad File Format), i.e. it is corrupted. This is the reason for the crash you observe. You can also see that something is wrong when you try to launch the renamed file from the desktop: Nothing happens, i.e. HDDRIVER is not launched. When I replace HDDRIVER.SYS on your image with a proper HDDRIVER.SYS, HDDRIVER is booting fine.

Any idea why this file is broken? The way HDDRUTIL installs HDDRIVER (either initially or during an update) has not changed with HDDRIVER 12, and it has been working for ages. What happens when you delete HDDRIVER.SYS and re-install HDDRIVER? Is the resulting HDDRIVER.SYS again broken?

[TheNameOfTheGame]

Really have no idea why it broke. I didn't do anything unusual during the update that I know of. And the 2nd card also had the problem. Maybe my download of HDDriver was corrupted? As I mentioned the 2nd card was repairable by booting the floppy version of the driver and reinstalling to the card that way so at least the floppy version I have is good.

In any case, I couldn't get the 1st card working again even with no HDDRIVER.SYS so maybe the card is just bad. It doesn't bomb anymore when booting the floppy version but doesn't work after installing the driver. That card is going in the trash as I don't trust it anymore. The 2nd card is fine so I'll be using that.

Thanks for the help.

[uweseimet]

It is unlikely that your download was corrupted, considering that you could successfully launch HDDRUTIL in order to update HDDRIVER. So at least HDDRUTIL was very likely not corrupted. The HDDRIVER binary that HDDRUTIL installs is embedded in HDDRUTIL (it is not the HDDRIVER.PRG in the AUTO folder), which means that HDDRIVER itself (the copy installed) should also not have been corrupted.

All in all this does not sound like a broken CF card to me, but if a different card works fine you at least seem to have a solution that is working for you. If the CF card is broken there should have been an error message by HDDRUTIL when installing HDDRIVER, and a complete sector of the HDDRIVER.SYS file should be corrupted, not just a few bytes.

[mikro]

Don't you have your CT60 overclocked by any chance? I witnessed subtle I/O corruption on the IDE channel when using CT60 + EtherNAT + higher frequencies for instance.

[FatRakoon]

Just somethign that may or may not be useful.

I was using v11.04 and I tried to go back to a CF Card and I bought a brand new 32GB Sandisk Extreme.

Now, what I did, was to create the same partitions as what was on my 160GB IDE but with the C: to I: All being 1GB or less for TOS and J: being a 1GB RAW for MINT and the rest of the card as one FAT32 as J:. The IDE HD had massive partitions as J: and K: but were OTT.

I{ then just copied everythign over and of course it did not boot but when I tried to install HD Driver, it failed.

I gave up until recently, when I got a copy of a CF card and so I burned that copy onto my CF Card and it booted.

After some piddling about, one of the things I noticed, was that the version of HD Driver was v11.28 ( Now correct me but the vbersion may not be EXACTLY 11.28 but thats hitting my head. )

I have ONLY just bought the upgrade but as I cannot find my Serial number, I have not yet downloaded it.

But my original v11.04 certainly did NOT like the 32GB CF Card but the 11.28 certainly did.

I know you have v12 but hey ho, it might be something or nothing?

I assume you have gone back to v10