exxos's Atari, Amiga & retro forum

exxos wrote: 27 Apr 2019 17:21 You need tos206 and the wire connected to the DMA port pin 10 to boot from ide....

Yep, have DMA pin 10 connected, and was trying to boot from TOS 2.06. CBHD did let me install the driver, but gave 4 bombs (I think, may have been more) when loading the driver from HDD.

AHDI and CBHD are pretty old TBH, so will try the demo HDDRIVER later.

Good luck with the driver RJ. For a newbie like myself it was pretty easy to set up and is quite a capable bit of software too.

In other news, my rather expensive (£1.05) IDE to CF adaptors arrived today. They also work fine with the IDE board but yet again these 3 Chinese cards don't work.

The new adaptor plugs straight into the IDE board, so only the power to connect. Not really practical for an Atari ste to the height limits but it's another board we can cross off the list :D

I'm going to send one of the cards that don't work to Icky and exxos and will then take the third one apart. Not really bothered that they don't work, just be interesting to find out why. Will post some pics for those interested later on.

Do the cards work with a PC? Would be worth trying, even if just with a a USB to IDE device.

rubber_jonnie wrote: 27 Apr 2019 21:15 Do the cards work with a PC? Would be worth trying, even if just with a a USB to IDE device.

Yes they all work with my USB to multi card adaptor

Hmm, strange.

My adapter is quite an old one, holds 2 cf cards, though just using one at the moment. Think I have a 16GB CF card that worked on my previous IDE adapter, though that was in an STE. Should try it anyway.

You'll be fine with the 16gb card. These are cheap Chinese unbranded ones. I just find it amusing that it does work on the PC but not on the ST

Yeah, it is odd, especially since CF is basically IDE, but I have heard a few tales of incompatibilities, I think it may have been timings, but can't quite remember the specifics.

Quick update.

Late last night I downloaded the HDDRIVER demo, and was able to get the Fujitsu MH2064 running and booting happily.

The same was the case for the Unigen 4GB CF card I posted earlier.

The Co Pilot 128MB, which is identified as a Toshiba device,, doesn't seem to want to play nice, but I'm not overly worried since it is pretty low capacity.

I've got a 16GB CF to check later and some other IDE devices, so I'll report back later.

Looks like HDDRIVER is the charm.

Just found this languishing at the bottom of a drawer:
Be interesting to see if it works.

Ok, so to recap, these are all tested and work. By which I mean they boot up from themselves once partitioned and the driver is installed.
Interestingly, I got the 128MB Co-Pilot card to work after I used Diskpart on my Win 10 machine to wipe it completely.

So, all of the above now boot happily under TOS 2.06 using the HDDRIVER demo software, even the Transcend 128MB module, which was plugged into the board directly as below.
They are available in much larger sizes too.

I did hook up an Iomega Rev drive, which has a 35GB removeable cartridge. Unfortunately, I haven't got anywhere with it, but some of that may be as the result of using the demo drivers. I'm kinda considering buying them now, despite the €45 price tag. We'll see.