Date   : Thu, 16 Jul 2009 11:16:11 +0100
From   : acorn@... (Andy Ford)
Subject: Small help needed with initialising a L3 hard drive

Thanks to everyone for advice so far.

I have tried using the Master's internal co-pro as well but with no luck 
unfortunately.

Anders, the 64mb card is a Kodak actually, I grabbed it off ebay as 
there seemed to be shortage of small cards from UK suppliers (as I 
wanted quick delivery) , I did not give a lot of thought to the brand as 
it was a well known one.

I should add, I have no problem at all using either card or either 
physical hard drive with ADFS, they work fine. :)

Ian, I had already thought of that. ;) The routines I have (you will 
have these too cfbackup and cfrestore) , do not "appear" to take in the 
L3 partition unfortunately. I had already tried this a while ago by 
cheating via Beebem (creating various size drives installing L3 etc) , 
but the utilities do not seem to take account of the L3 partition too.

As it "should" work with a small card (64mb so 32mb usable) I think I 
may see about getting another different brand CF card later as perhaps I 
have just been unlucky with my choice :) , although I do have a good 
home for it in the DC instead actually so its not going to go to waste.


Andy. :)


Ian Wolstenholme wrote:
> 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.
>
> _______________________________________________
> bbc-micro mailing list
> bbc-micro@...
> http://lists.cloud9.co.uk/mailman/listinfo/bbc-micro
>
>   
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> _______________________________________________
> bbc-micro mailing list
> bbc-micro@...
> http://lists.cloud9.co.uk/mailman/listinfo/bbc-micro
>