partitioning CF on Falcon with mixed TOS/Windows partitions

[nokturnal]

Hello,
I've got problem with reading TOS/Windows mixed partitions under plain TOS 4.4 (hd driver v. 8.23). I've got two cards Kingston 1GB and Sandisk Ultra II 2GB.
I cannot partition Sandisk at all, I receive 'Cannot write to boot sector' each time I want to repartiton it.

I am able to partition Kingston CF (one partition, ~700mb size to satisfy TOS limitations, byte swapping on, TOS/Windows compatible). The problem is that I can access this CF under Windows XP, but cannot under TOS (there is a drive letter 'R', but drive is inaccessible). So what I have to do with it? I am using BIGDOS (falcon version). Because CF reader is after my main drive, which eats up all the possible letters (C-P). I haven't tried it without bigdos yet (I don't have a floppy drive to launch hd driver, but I think the result will be the same).

Both cards work under Freemint formatted as FAT/FAT32, so CF reader seems to be ok.

[uweseimet]

Hi,

how did you manage to use your Sandisk with MiNT when you had problems partitioning it? For HDDRIVER the type of reader or card or the size of the card is not relevant because a CF card reader is nothing but an IDE drive from HDDRIVER's point of view. The biggest card I have tested HDDRIVER with is a 16 GB SD card, but any size up to 2048 GB should work, because this is the maximum drive size that an Atari can support.
As far as Big-DOS is concerned it is known (the author even mentions it somewhere on his website or the documentation) that there are certain problems with TOS 4.0, i.e. with the Falcon. As long as you want to use partitions up to 1 GB with your Falcon you don't need Big-DOS anyway. And as long as you only have a single partition on your card with HDDRIVER you can map it to drive A: or B:, i.e. you can do without drive R:. The HDDRIVER manual explains how to map a drive to a particular drive letter.
Hope this helps.

Cheers

Uwe

[nokturnal]

uweseimet: Hi, how did you manage to use your Sandisk with MiNT when you had problems partitioning it?
I've formatted it under Windows not with hd driver. The 1GB CF card (Kingston) mixed TOS/Windows that I've managed to format under HD driver is visible/usable under FreeMint too(not only Windows). It's not usable under TOS, which undermines a little existence of mixed partition idea .

uweseimet: As far as Big-DOS is concerned it is known (the author even mentions it somewhere on his website or the documentation) that there are certain problems with TOS 4.0,> i.e. with the Falcon. As long as you want to use partitions up to 1 GB with your Falcon you don't need Big-DOS anyway. And as long as you only have a single partition on your card with HDDRIVER you can map it to drive A: or B:, i.e. you can do without drive R:. The HDDRIVER manual explains how to map a drive to a particular drive letter. Hope this helps.

I didn't know that I can map anything to A or B, it's good to know. I thought that those letters are reserved for floppy drives only. Thanks, I will try it.

P.S. I think that you should consider making posts on other Atari sites every new release, I've discovered that there is new version of HD driver today totally by accident. I would like to subscribe to announcements part of forum to receive mails, but it seems that there is no possibility.
P.S. 2 Why BBCode is disabled globally? It could help in making posts more readable.

[uweseimet]

Hi,

>It's not usable under TOS, which undermines a little existence of mixed partition idea

Hmm, other users including me use this feature regularly without any problems. Are you sure that your partition size was not more than 1 GB? Actually it has to be a bit less than 1 GB with TOS 4.0.

>I didn't know that I can map anything to A or B, it's good to know. I thought that those letters are reserved for floppy drives only.

TOS uses A: and B: for floppies, but HDDRIVER can override this, see the settings in the "Devices and Partitions" dialog.

>I would like to subscribe to announcements part of forum to receive mails, but it seems that there is no possibility.

I will check this. Can you send me an email with a description of what you tried to do and why it did not work? Thank you.
There is an RSS feed for HDDRIVER news on the HDDRIVER website, by the way.

>Why BBCode is disabled globally? It could help in making posts more readable.

BBCodes are enabled now.

Cheers

Uwe

[nokturnal]

I've assigned B letter to CF card and disabled BIGDOS. But the mixed partition still wasn't visible. I've repartitioned it now and changed it to BGM type and I can access it as a B drive. But it is not that I have intended to do.
I'm sure about the size that I assigned to mixed TOS/Windows partition, it was ~700mb for sure (I've entered value < 1GB intentionally to avoid problems under TOS).

Regards,
Pawel

[uweseimet]

Hi,

I will check that. In order to do that please tell me the details of your media/partition setup, in particular the number of physical sectors of the whole drive, the number of partitions and the partition sizes in physical sectors and all of your compatibility settings.
Thank you.

Cheers

Uwe

[uweseimet]

Hi,

thank you for sending me the required data. I have tested everything and found no problem, neither with HDDRIVER 8.40 nor with HDDRIVER 8.23. For my tests I used Hatari with TOS 4.04 because this way I can work with any TOS version and with drive images of any size.

1. Under Linux I created a hard disk image file of 1014644736 bytes, which is 1981728 sectors with 512 bytes per sector, exactly the size of your Kingston 1 GB CF card.
2. In Hatari I started HDDRUTIL and created a partition of 699.9 MB. HDDRUTIL chose 63 as the start sector and 1433375 as the end sector, just as in your example.
3. In the compatibility dialog I selected TOS/Windws compatible.
4. I did not change any other setting and did not enter any other data (also no partition types because HDDRUTIL will set the right types itself) but just clicked on OK.
5. After a reboot I had no problem accessing the new partition and writing data to it with plain TOS 4.04.
6. Additionally, I checked the partition data with DISKUS and also could not find anything unusual.

I think this is all I can do for a test, so I don't think anything is wrong in the way the partition is created by HDDRUTIL. Looks as if there is something else that is not working. I still wonder why problems with your Sandisk are reported when writing sectors. This is an indication of a hardware/cable problem.

Cheers

Uwe

[nokturnal]

I'm not very satisfied with your answer. Yes, maybe it can be cable problem. But Hatari is not real machine and it is not fully operational. For example you cannot run atari debugger on it - every debugger crashes the system.
If this is the cable problem, so why I can access and use the same CF under Freemint (FAT/FAT32 mixed partition and windows only) and cannot use it from TOS? I have IDE drive connected to the same bus and it works fine and I haven't any problems with it.

I am using hd driver 8.23 on mega ste too with two SD cards and everything works fine there. Mixed partition works as expected and I am able to exchange data between TOS machine and PC. Why I cannot do this on Falcon with CompactFlash card?

[uweseimet]

Hi,

I'm afraid I can only show that there is nothing wrong with the way HDDRUTIL's partitioning works, and for that Hatari is perfect because I can use drive images of any size. There is no way I could use your CF card physically, so I have to use an emulated drive image for any tests. But for HDDRIVER and HDDRUTIL an emulation is not different from a physical system.

You mentioned that you have no problems with mixed partitions with your SD cards, which confirms my results that there is nothing wrong with the partitions created by HDDRUTIL. So it can only be your CF hardware that makes the difference somehow, but I cannot provide more help on the nature of this difference. I would even go so far to predict that with Windows only partitions you will run into the same problems sooner or later, even if they appear to work at the moment. The fact that errors are reported sometimes when writing to your card shows that something is basically wrong. Some sectors may be bad, for instance, and depending on the partitioning scheme these sectors are used or remain unused. This can explain your problem easily.
But as already mentioned, I'm afraid I cannot do more to help you than I have done by running all these tests.

Cheers

Uwe

[nokturnal]

I've made also some further tests. I've done full sector checking on this CF card and there were no issues.

Second thing that I have made was repartitioning with byte swapping unchecked. The result was that, I was able the open drive when quiting from hddrutil, but only once, after repartitioning. As expected it was not readable under windows. After reboot CF card was once again inaccessible and as I have said before CF card is fully operational when I change partition type to BGM.