Date   : Thu, 16 Jul 2009 09:59:19 +0100
From   : bbcmailinglist@... (Ian Wolstenholme)
Subject: Small help needed with initialising a L3 hard drive

Just another thought - is it possible to take a full image of an
ADFS-formatted and Econet-partitioned CF card?  Perhaps then somebody
who has all the hardware necessary to make up cards of different sizes
(ie. me) could create images which people could write to the CF card on
their PC and cut out the HDINIT and WFSINIT business.

Best wishes,


Ian

----- Original Message -----
From: Andy Ford [mailto:acorn@...]
To: bbc-micro@...
Sent: Wed, 15 Jul 2009 20:59:41 +0100
Subject: [BBC-Micro] Small help needed with initialising a L3 hard drive

Good evening. :)

I know this has been discussed a few times, I did a search and read the 
threads I found but I am still struggling a little bit with this, its 
starting to drive me crazy as its such a simple thing too. :)

I am unable to initialise a disk for Level 3, I am currently using the 
latest version of WFSINIT from JGH's site (the one that reads the disk 
size so ideal for IDE interfaces if it cannot read the disk geometry) , 
I have tried other versions of this but the latest one seems to be the 
best one.

However, I do not seem to be able to get this to work properly.

I have tried two (physical) drives, one is 4.3Gb and the other just over 
1Gb. Now, there is no problem whatsoever with formatting these via 
HDINIT and using them as normal drives. The same with my CF card (which 
is a 1Gb card so 512 or so formatted) , I can happily use this for ADFS 
as well without any issue.

My problem is despite trying everything, WFSINIT will fail with the 
usual Dim Space error at line 350 :(

No problem I thought. I would simply cheat and obtained a small (64Mb) 
flash card. I formatted this and it gave me about 31Mb, which is plenty. 
The problem with this (note: this same problem happens with both HDINIT 
and WFSINIT) , it cannot read the size for some reason...

What happens with HDINIT is this: If I investigate the drive, it finds 
the correct size and I can format it, no problem there. Now, if I 
attempt to scan for size, it counts to 32768 and then locks the machine 
up (caps lock etc has no effect, I have to Break out of it)

The WFSINIT routine locks at the same point too, I am wondering what's 
the best option really at this point, I assume the modifications to 
WFSINIT are simply the change of code to allow it to find the size 
instead of geometry (as per Scan For Size in HDINIT)

As a quick note: I do my usual preparation first (copy the FS code to 
the hard drive and reserve about 1Mb with some temporary files, compact 
it and then hard reboot before going any further)

Any thoughts would be greatly appreciated as usual :)


Andy.

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