exxos's Atari, Amiga & retro forum

I own an Atari Mega ST2 and an UltraSatan drive. I am having issues formatting, partitioning and using SD cards in the UltraSatan. Right now, when performing writes, there is a good chance that the LED on the UltraSatan will stay on and I will get a disk error. Reads don't seem to be an issue as I do have two working SD cards that are "locked" to prevent writing. I can read these without any issues. I also have issues booting from the UltraSatan, BUT these appear to only happen if the UltraSatan has a previous issue first and I don't restart the UltraSatan.

The ST has 4meg of memory, using the 18 pin DIP ICs. Mainboard is revision 5. CPU and Floppy controllers are not socketed. Power supply is a Meanwell unit. TOS is 1.04 in six chips. The HD driver I'm using is ICD 6.5.5 and I will be getting HDDriver soon. I have seven different SD cards of various sizes and manufacture that I am trying to use. I don't appear to be having any floppy drive issues.

To try and fix this issue I have done the following...
- Added a pull-up resistor pack to my DMA chip data lines
- Resoldered the joints on the ACSI connector
- Replaced the PSU with a Meanwell unit, which seemed to improve things slightly
- Swapped out U26 (7406), and U21 (74LS02)
- Swapped out the DMA chip (U27?)
- Added a resistor pack to the new DMA chip, which seems to have made things much worse
- Tried several different USB power supplies on the UltraSatan
- Memory tests all pass, so data isn't getting corrupted in RAM (unless there is a software glitch)

I will be removing the resistor pack from my DMA chip, so things should get better, but they still won't be 100%.

What should be my next move? What could be the issue here?

Do the mandatory fixes.

I'm not sure if the ICD tools will even work with SD cards. Better to use HD11.

It's possible, and I might be wrong here, that I already answered this on FB (It looks very similar), but like @exxos I think it'd be worth your while testing another driver.

There is a demo version for HDDRIVER which would at least let you see if you get a different result.

Personally, I always stick to Sandisk SD cards from a trusted source, as they seem to work very well.

Another problem I have come across is that the SD card sockets do not seem to be great on ultrasatan, I have had bad contacts on them which has caused data loss and apparent sector corruption. I can only correct these errors by doing a full format on the PC.

I had the same problem as described in the initial post. Writes to an Ultrasatan would sometimes fail, with the LED remaining on until the next power cycle. This was repeatable across many machines and with different drivers. I retested the same machine X driver matrix with a Gigafile (using the same SD card) without any issues whatsoever. Therefore, by process of exclusion, I concluded that the Ultrasatan was most likely at fault.

However, I decided that it was not worth debugging other people's hardware, especially as I already had a working ACSI harddisk replacement (the Gigafile). In the meantime, I have returned the Ultrasatan.

EDIT: Of course, it might have been a SD card socket issue on the US, as Exxos suggested in his post.

I have an Ultrasatan and ICD Pro 6.5.5 driver in my STE and everything works great.

I only use Sandisk SD cards (and CF cards) because they have no compatibility issues.

I had some troubles with Transcend SD cards in the Ultrasatan, and other brands were sometimes not recognized at all.

It is maybe worth checking Jookie's web site concerning the Ultrasatan:

http://joo.kie.sk/?page_id=192

@Calab

Can you also confirm you have purchased your ultrasatan from Lotharek ? I half recall there being some other clones of this starting to appear were malfunctioning from the start.

exxos wrote: 08 Oct 2021 13:52 Can you also confirm you have purchased your ultrasatan from Lotharek ? I half recall there being some other clones of this starting to appear were malfunctioning from the start.

The UltraSatan was purchased used, so I don't know the source. I'm considering opening it up to look for anything odd and will take some photos if I do.

exxos wrote: 08 Oct 2021 09:36 Do the mandatory fixes.

I'm not sure if the ICD tools will even work with SD cards.Better to use HD11.

Resistor pack on the DMA chip made things worse. I will be removing it.

I haven't done the address bus or data bus resistor packs. Didn't realize that this was a thing on the Mega ST2.

I just received Petars HD driver... I just need to give it a try and see if it makes any difference.

I have a friend about an hour and a half away with some ST's... If all else fails, I'll drop my US off with him and see if the issues follow the device.

rubber_jonnie wrote: 08 Oct 2021 12:19 It's possible, and I might be wrong here, that I already answered this on FB (It looks very similar), but like @exxos I think it'd be worth your while testing another driver.

There is a demo version for HDDRIVER which would at least let you see if you get a different result.

Personally, I always stick to Sandisk SD cards from a trusted source, as they seem to work very well.

That is probably me on Facebook.

I just received HDDriver and will be putting it to the test later today.

I haven't had issues with these SD cards on my Windows machine, nor on my TRS-80 Color Computer with SDC, but the US might just be more sensitive.