CF CARD shows as unitialized when booting from PCMCIA.

[Tallguy58]

Hello again.

When booting a CF Card plugged into the PCMCIA port into workbench, CF0: shows as initialized.
Can this be rectified?

Thank you,
Alexander.

[pulchart]

Hello,

That CF0: icon is an OS-driven auto-mount of the card you're already booting from. Here's what's going on when you boot from the CF in PCMCIA slot while keeping CF0 + fat95 in DEVS:DOSDrivers/CF0`:

1. Your boot card is RDB-partitioned (that's what makes it bootable)in the PCMCIA using cfd device driver (whatever filesystem).
2. Separately, you also have a CF0 mount entry active in DEVS:DOSDrivers/ which also uses PCMCIA via cfd device driver and fat95 filesystem handler.
3. That entry tells AmigaOS to mount the whole card with fat95, which expects a plain (or MBR/GPT) FAT-formatted card.
4. AmigaOS auto-mounts everything in DEVS:DOSDrivers/ at startup (in S:Startup-Sequence), so CF0: gets mounted too, pointing fat95 at the very same physical card in PCMCIA.
5. fat95 detects the card, finds an RDB instead of an MBR/GPT/flat layout, and (correctly) gives up on it. The "uninitialized" icon is fat95 telling you "I'm working, disk found, but the disk isn't in a state I can use."

I can't have the driver quietly suppress it, because that auto-mount is driven by AmigaOS itself (it binds everything in
DEVS:DOSDrivers/), and a device can't cleanly refuse to be mounted (even if already mounted multiple times) on one of its own units.

The "fix" is to stop the OS from auto-mounting CF0:. Just move the mount entry out of the auto-mount drawer:
Like DEVS:DOSDrivers/CF0 -> SYS:Storage/DOSDrivers/CF0. Anything in Storage/DOSDrivers/ is left alone at boot, it just sits there. Reboot and the stray "uninitialized" CF0: icon will be gone.

Hope that sorts it,
Jaroslav

[Tallguy58]

I found a solution using GiggleDisk.
I added this s:user-startup

GiggleDisk >NIL: compactflash.device 0
IF NOT WARN
    GiggleDisk compactflash.device 0 >T:TestMount
    Search >NIL: T:TestMount fat95
    IF WARN
       ASSIGN CF0: DISMOUNT
    ENDIF
    Delete >NIL: T:TestMount
ENDIF

Alexander.