Compact Flash with Qubide

[dilwyn]

I've spent today repairing my Aurora-based Minis-QL computer. It has a Super Gold Card and Qubide.

For many months it's had an irritating intermittent fault where it sometimes wouldn't start up if the Qubide was present and on the occasions I've used it recently I've had to rely on a ROMdisq as mass storage and disconnected the Qubide.

So, today, I basically took it all to bits, cleaned and reseated everything and suddenly it all sprang back to life, and worked with the Qubide for the first time. After a previous hard disk failure, it only had a very small capacity hard disk, so I decided I'd have a go at replacing the hard disk with a 4GB compact flash card and IDE CF adaptor.

minsiql_cf.jpg

It's shown plugged directly into the Qubide in the picture, in practice it'll be connected via a short 40-ay IDE cable to allow it to lie where the hard disk was inside the case. Maybe one day I'll extend it to make the card removable.

Formatting it with FORMAT WIN1_name and telling it create as big a WIN drive as possible (block size 64) took and hour per pass! But it worked first time

Where I came unstuck was using the PARTITION_EXE program from the Qubide utilities disk to try to create partitions to use the remaining 2GB (Qubide ROM 2.01, partition program v2). While a 2GB WIN1_ seems wasteful in some ways (it'll probably use most of the Super Gold Card RAM for slave blocks and map!) I wanted to try to use the other 2GB to 'mirror backup' the first 2GB. I realise if anything goes wrong I lose both partitions, but it's more of a facility in case I accidentally delete something important.

Anyway, PARTITION_EXE doesn't seem to work with it, using either a QDOS JM ROM or SMSQ/E. It gets as far as turning on the drive indicator light when it asks which drive to use and when I press Y in response to being asked Is This The Right Drive the light on the CF card interface turns off and PARTITION_EXE locks up. It's not a full crash, I can go back to BASIC and remove the PARTITION_EXE job.

Anyone got any idea what might be going wrong? I don't mind too much, 2GB seems to be MORE than enough though.

I had a look at the sources on my website but the one program for which there seems to be no source file is of course PARTITION_EXE!

[RWAP]

I recall having some problems with some of the utilities provided for the v2 ROM - but from memory the main issue was with the trashcan program which would delete files you didn't want deleting, or would fail to restore them, but remove them from the trashcan.

It has been a while since I used QubIDE and the partition program...

I wonder if it cannot handle more than 2GB... or whether you were supposed to partition the drive before formatting it....

[tofro]

Dilwyn,
when looking into the QubIDE manual (I once considered buying one), I find it can't handle more than 2GB of disk space.
(8 partitions of 256MB) = 2 GB.

(4) Partitions are limited in size to 256 megabytes, or 128 megabytes if you use smaller blocks. See the suggestions on block size above.

How did you end up with a 2GB partition? Is this some newer extension to the firmware?

Regards,
Tobias

[RWAP]

v2.01 ROMs support a 2GB partition I believe....

[vanpeebles]

Have you tried a different CF card when I first started trying cf cards on my Acorn, I found some worked while other didn't. Not all have the IDE support

[dilwyn]

Dilwyn,
when looking into the QubIDE manual (I once considered buying one), I find it can't handle more than 2GB of disk space.
(8 partitions of 256MB) = 2 GB.

(4) Partitions are limited in size to 256 megabytes, or 128 megabytes if you use smaller blocks. See the suggestions on block size above.

How did you end up with a 2GB partition? Is this some newer extension to the firmware?

Regards,
Tobias

The Qubide manual only mentions block sizes 4 and 8, whereas the utilities disk text files mention block sizes up to 64, as follows:
block size 4 gives up to 128MB partition (2K units)
block size 8 gives up to 256MB partition (4K units)
block size 16 gives up to 512MB partition (8k units)
block size 32 gives up to 1GB partition (16k units)
block size 64 gives up to 2GB partition (very large block size of about 32K each I think - wasteful for small files!)

IIRC, the block size is the number of 512 byte sectors to use per 'block' and you can have up to 65536 max of these 'blocks'

The primary partition seems to work fine at 2GB, certainly I can copy large numbers of files to it.

If the Qubide format is based on FAT16 with 512 byte sector, I think the max is clusters of 32K, giving up to 2GB, which probably explains what's going on.

I have more than one of these CF adaptors, sometime this week I'll try the others. I have a little 16MB compact flash from an old digital camera somewhere, I'll try that too. There is more than one type of CF card, so it'll be interesting to try them to see what works and what doesn't. I have also ordered a dual slot (master/slave setup) IDE-CF adaptor which has the form factor of a 2.5 inch hard disk, so that'll be interesting to try too when it arrives. I'll write up all the results when I have them!

Anyway, it's been fun playing with the Minis-QL again and actually getting it fully working for the first time in over a year. Although QPC and QemuLator are fun to use, nothing beats hands-on with proper QL hardware (QL or Aurora).