Need help setting up a GigaFile with HDDRIVER

[Quagmire]

I recently bought a GigaFile from Inventronik, along with their ACSI adapter cable and a registered copy of the HDDriver software package (v10.18).

I've spent the entire day yesterday trying to get this up and running with no good result. It's been very frustrating. I boot the STE (rainbow TOS and 4MB ram) with the hddriver floppy to load the HDDRIVER.PRG driver for the GigaFile, then manually run HDDUTIL.APP program. Both see the GigaFile with no problems, but when I try to create a partition or do anything in the Medium menu I get an "Out of Memory" error. I've been through the HDDRIVER user manual repeatedly, I've watched and followed along with a bunch of tutorials on using the software, but I'm not getting anywhere.

The interesting thing is that while I'm using an 8GB SD card, the GF is reporting a capacity of 8.67PB, a sector count of 1,110,257,713 and a sector size in Bytes of 8,389,122. These are clearly bogus numbers and I guess that it's no wonder that I'm seeing "out of memory" errors when I attempt to partition the drive. I don't know what to do about it though. I see these same numbers whether I have an SD card inserted or not. FWIW, I've tried multiple ST computers and several different size and mfg SD cards. The cards are right out of the packaging and are brand names ordered from Amazon.

I also downloaded the hddriver demo package just to verify that it wasn't corrupt files on my disk.

What should I do with the SD cards on my windows 10 machine to get them ready for use in the GF?

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

[uweseimet]

This looks like a hardware issue, e.g. a problem with the ACSI cable or an incompatibility of your SD cards (maybe they are all of the same brand) with the GigaFile. The fact that the capacity and sector size of your SD card is not correctly reported is a strong indication for a hardware problem.
I recommend contacting Inventronik about this.

[Quagmire]

Thanks. I sent them a contact email with this information as well. I'm waiting to hear from them.

[Ektus]

I've had problems with a Gigafile connected to my Mega ST. There's a known hardware problem that's described in detail on Exxos' page and can be remedied by adding two tiny capacitors. I don't know if the STE exhibits the same behaviour, though.

https://www.exxoshost.co.uk/atari/last/ ... /index.htm


Regards
Ektus.