Add a Solid State Hard Drive to Your Amiga 600 or 1200 Using a Compact Flash Card with IDE Adapter (30-60 mins)

Hardware, Utilities

Task: Add a Solid State Hard Drive to Your Amiga 600 or 1200 Using a Compact Flash Card with IDE Adapter

Needed: Amiga with IDE Support, Compact Flash Card, IDE-CF Adapter, WinUAE and Windows PC, Kickstart ROM, Workbench Install Disks (ADFs)

Time: 30-60 Minutes

Disclosure: Note that as an eBay Partner Network Affiliate, I may earn from qualifying purchases

Introduction

I recently purchased an Amiga 1200 which has hard drive support through an internal IDE connector. Adding a hard drive is appealing since booting from floppy disk or a Gotek floppy drive emulator can be quite tedious and slow. The good news is that there are solid state options using compact flash (CF) or secure digital (SD) card solutions through an IDE adapter. I went with a CF card adapter that I purchased for less than $30 from AmiKit on eBay. This is shown below inserted into the IDE slot on my 1200.

This project describes the basics of setting up the CF card for use as a hard drive on a real Amiga 600 or 1200. I cover how to install Workbench on the CF card in the next project. Note that I started with 4GB, 8GB, and 32GB CF cards. All three got corrupted or failed. One came DOA from Amazon. I concluded that these are flaky. I instead purchased a micro SD to CF adapter that I purchased on Amazon for $16. This works great and I have a bunch of 32GB and 64GB micro SD cards I use for various retrocomputing projects. Also, these 32GB cards are cheaper at around $5 each.

Instructions

I would first like to say that there are a lot of sources of instructions online for how to do this build. Use Google to find them. I personally did not find any one source to have everything I needed to be successful. Below is a set of instructions I pieced together that worked well for me and yielded repeatable results. If this does not work on your setup you might need to consult some of the other sources, as I did, and vary some of the steps and settings. In that sense, this project can be frustrating if you find my instructions do not work for you. I hope what follows helps you find speedy success!

We will first use DISKPART in Windows to prepare the CF / SD card (STEP 1). The rest of the steps use the WinUAE emulator to create the disk partition(s) and format the disk drive(s). I will assume you already have WinUAE successfully installed and running with some familiarity. I have a brief project on the installation.

STEP 1 – Clean the CF Card Using DISKPART in Windows

  1. Connect your CF or SD card to your PC. You will need a CF card reader. I always start by formatting the card to FAT32, although this might not be necessary
  2. Open the Windows command prompt and run as administrator
  3. Type DISKPART and hit enter to launch
  4. Type LIST DISK and hit enter
  5. Type SELETC DISK # to select your CF / SD card
  6. Type CLEAN to prepare the card for Amiga formatting

STEP 2 – Run and Configure WinUAE

  1. Run WinUAE as administrator
  2. Setup a configuration file for the emulated Amiga that will build the hard drive and install Workbench. The general idea here is to choose some faster settings, so the installation takes less time than a real Amiga
    • Under Configurations give your config a name (e.g. Amiga 1200) and a description (e.g. Workbench 3.1, Hard Drive)
    • Under CPU choose at least a 68020 CPU
    • Under Chipset choose AGA for the Amiga 1200
    • Under ROM choose your Kickstart ROM
    • Under RAM choose at least 2MB of chip RAM and 8MB of fast RAM
    • Under Floppy Drive load your Workbench disk in drive DF0 and the Workbench install disk in drive DF1. You can also pre-load two additional disks (e.g. Storage and Locale) in DF2 and DF3. You can add or change disks anytime during the install process
    • Under CD and Hard Drives choose ADD HARD DRIVE and select your CF / SD card from the Hard Drive menu. Mine shows up as “Generic Multi-Card 1.00”. Make sure Read/Write is selected. Also select “Commodore A600/A1200/A400 IDE” from the menu in the bottom left quadrant as we want this to run on original hardware. Click ADD HARD DRIVE button at bottom
    • We now need to download the Professional File System (PFS) software that allows CF / SD cards and partitions of more than 4MB. It is also a faster file system. I found that a recent development version of PFS (download v3.2) worked well for bigger partitions. I had trouble getting older versions to work. Do this by clicking the ADD DIRECTORY OR ARCHIVE button on the CD and Hard Drives screen. You can give the Device Name as PFS or similar and Volume Label of PFS0 to designate this is the PFS software that is being mounted as shown below. Click SELECT ARCHIVE OR PLAIN FILE and select the pfs3aio file extracted from the zip you downloaded. Select the BOOTABLE option. Hit OK
    • Go back to the Configurations page and choose SAVE so you don’t need to reconfigure these settings later

STEP 3 – Launch Workbench from Floppy Disk

  1. From the screen shown just above hit the START button to launch your emulated Amiga booting Workbench off of floppy drive #1. You should see a screen like below with the PFS directory and any floppy disks you loaded into the drives along with the standard RAM disk that comes with Workbench for temporary RAM-based storage

STEP 4 – Prepare Hard Drive Type Using HDToolBox

  1. Next, we need prepare the CF / SD card Hard Drive type. Open the Install disk and open the HDTools folder
  2. Now launch HDToolBox. You should see a hard drive listed with status as “Unknown”. Click on CHANGE DRIVE TYPE button and the DEFINE NEW. Then click on READ CONFIGURATION button and CONTINUE twice then OK. Click OK back to the main screen as shown below. Don’t worry about any error messages. If you can’t see your CF / SD card, try formatting as FAT32 and redo the Step 1 above with DISKPART. Click SAVE CHANGES TO DRIVE

STEP 5 – Partition the Hard Drive (i.e. CF card)

  1. Select the PARTITION DRIVE button shown above to start partitioning the drive. The initial screen should look like Panel #1 below with two default partitions. I used an 32MB microSD card and will set three partitions for Workbench (~0.5GB), Utilities (~4GB), and Games (~4BG). Again, the PFS v3.2 developmental software makes it possible to create these bigger partitions. I did not see any need to go with bigger partitions as I will never use that extra space. There are several steps to setup and prepare each partition:
    • First, check ADVANCED OPTIONS and then click ADD/UPDATE to add the new PFS v3.2 file system. On the next screen select ADD NEW FILE SYSTEM and enter PFS0:pfs3aio as the mounted drive name and the PFS file name. This will tell WinUAE where your new PFS file system file is. Hit OK and then enter the DosType as 0x50465303 anbd hit enter. Remember to always hit enter after typing in a field value for it to be saved. The Version number is 20 with Revision 0. Hit OK and then OK again to take you back to the partitioning screen
    • Second, we need to change the file system for the first partition to PFS by clicking on the CHANGE button. As shown below in Panel #3, this brings up the File Systems Characteristics screen. Click on the box next to File System: until PFS\03 is selected. Now change the MaxTransfer field to 0x0001FE00 and hit enter to save. This will allow us to go bigger than a 4GB CF or SD card. Also click on the box next to File System Block Size: and move it from 512 to 1024. I read somewhere that the larger block setting might save some memory? Anyway, it works! When you are done, you screen should look like mine in Panel #3 below. Hit OK
    • Third, we need to set the size of the first bootable partition where Workbench will get installed. What worked really nicely for me was to set the size in increments of 1024 cylinders which is what we set the block size to in the last step. Use a different increment if you use a different block size. There are two ways to change the partition size measured in bytes in the Partitioning screen. You can try moving the little blue arrow. However, when that is far to the left for a small partition it can be hard to see the numbers indicating the size of the partition. Also, you do not have fine control over the size at the individual byte level. Instead, you can change the number in the field labeled Total Cyl:. I set this number in increments of 1024. In my setup, 1024 cylinders is equal to 472MB or ~0.5GB and 8192 cylinders (i.e. 8 blocks) is equal to 3779MB or ~4GB. I will use the ~0.5GB partition for installing Workbench (see note about this first partition size in comments at end) which only needs about 1.5MB. To see the size, you can click on and delete the second partition and then slide the black box representing the first partition to the write so the size in bytes is visible and not bleeding off the screen. I show this below in Panel #4. You can slide this partition all the way back to the left to prepare for addition the next partition. I also read somewhere to change the Buffers field from 30 to 100. The last thing to do for partition #1 is to change the Partition Device Name field from “UDH0” to “DH0” and hit enter
    • Fourth, you can repeat the process outlined in Step Three above for each additional partition. You could certainly just have the one partition and make it any size you want. My final setup has three partitions of ~1GB (2048 cylinders), ~4GB (8192 cylinders) and ~4GB as shown below in Panel #5
  2. When back at the Hard Drive Preparation, Partitioning, and Formatting Screen, be sure select SAVE CHANGES TO DRIVE
  3. Now hit F12 to return to WinUAE and select RESTART to boot back into Workbench. The three new hard drives should be visible on the desktop

STEP 6 – Format the New Hard Drives for Use

  1. Quit WinUAE, eject the CF / SD card, re-insert, restart WinUAE, and launch the virtual Amiga for a fresh start to make sure everything is in order for formatting. Note you do not need the mounted PFS directory anymore and can delete that before starting
  2. Left click on DH0 to select it then right click and choose FORMAT DISK from the Icons menu at the top of the screen. Set the volume name to Workbench or System or the like and hit enter. Deselect Trashcan. Select QUICK FORMAT to format the disk. Click through the warning and notice screens
  3. Repeat for each disk
  4. We are done! The CF / SD card is now setup for installation of Workbench, WHDLoad, and other files. We will cover that process in the next post and the one after. Below is our final product with Workbench installed

Comments

This is a tedious and confusing process the first time or two or three through. I had problems with CF cards and then had to find the right combination of settings to get this to work. Even the latest dev version of PFS that is made for bigger CF / SD cards was hard to find and not well documented. Alas, I have been through the instructions above several times now and have had consistent results. Good luck!!

Note that when I made the first partition 2048 cylinders or ~1GB I noticed that the third partition (Games) was not formatted correctly on my original Amiga 1200. When I would try to format it there, I would get an “object too large” error. Changing the Workbench partition down to 0.5GB or 1024 cylinders fixed the problem. I am not sure why. Part of the frustration of learning how to do this!!!

I found this post helpful when learning how to use PFS.