Michael J. Mahon wrote:
mdj wrote:On Feb 14, 11:35 am, "Michael J. Mahon" <mjma...@aol.com> wrote:As I pointed out, I have no I/O on this Apple //e except the CFFA, so, since hot swapping is not supported, I can't boot into ProDOS and a formatting utility, then insert the adapter. In fact, I don't have anyway of destroying the formatting except (I thought) by overwriting the volume and its partition map with CiderPress.Assuming you selected 'physical disks' in Ciderpress it should be writing to the raw volume, but it's at least possible that you overwrote the pre-existing partition on the SD card instead.It seems you are right. When I selected the SD card as a physical disk and tried to write the (4 ProDOS partition) volume image to it, it failed unable to write to block 128 (permission failure). So now I'll try to use a PC program to "unformat" the volume so that I can successfully overwrite it...
OK... I followed Tom's instructions to "clean" the SD card, then selected it as a physical disk in CiderPress and copied my 4-partition volume to it. All went well. When I placed the SD card in the CF adapter and installed it in the CFFA, then started the Apple //e, I got an "UNABLE TO LOAD PRODOS" message immediately after the beep. I put the CF adapter + SD card into my external CF card reader on my laptop and opened it with CiderPress. All is well, ProDOS is in the first partition. It looks just like my CF card that boots properly. For the record, if I boot the Apple with nothing in the CFFA, it hangs with the Apple //e banner. Same if I install the adapter without the SD card. I am currently unable to cause it to produce the original CFFA message I received, so the CFFA must do some validity checking of a CF card before attempting a boot. IIRC, "UNABLE TO LOAD PRODOS" is a message produced by the boot block, so the boot block must be getting loaded, and it's attempt to read the directory blocks must fail... Yet the directory is fine in CiderPress. I am beginning to have some hope of this eventually working, but still haven't ruled out adapter incompatibility--perhaps a timing issue with the CFFA. -michael NadaNet 3.1 for Apple II parallel computing! Home page: http://home.comcast.net/~mjmahon/ "The wastebasket is our most important design tool--and it's seriously underused."