PowerPak CF-compability

oRBIT2002 · Post by **oRBIT2002** » Mon Jun 25, 2007 12:24 pm

I'm going to get myself a new CF-card for use with my PowerPak. However I read at Nesworld that the author had quite some problems finding CF's that actually worked.
How come some CF's work and some doesn't? Isn't CF a standard and they should all work the same?

Can anyone recommend a good brand that do work?

peppers · Post by **peppers** » Mon Jun 25, 2007 12:27 pm

Adata's are usually fast and cheap they work well for me in all CF card devises

although I have tryed a few differint brands and have yet to find one witch will not work with it

nesworld · Post by **nesworld** » Mon Jun 25, 2007 1:56 pm

Well the kodak and canon CF cards I used are really old, but I don't know why the Kingston one didn't work... I've even formatted it several times to be sure...

- Martin

bunnyboy · Post by **bunnyboy** » Mon Jun 25, 2007 2:22 pm

Can you list the error codes for each card? If it is getting to that point then reading from the card is working with no errors. Some like the 4MB one may have Windows lieing to you about which format it is...

Most CF cards are standard, but there are definitely variations. I even have a fake Sandisk card that can't do LBA, just CHS. Not sure how a mem card has heads!

Dwedit · Post by **Dwedit** » Mon Jun 25, 2007 2:37 pm

How does it detect the presence or absence of a partition table?

remowilliams · Post by **remowilliams** » Mon Jun 25, 2007 2:41 pm

I tried an old Kodak 4MB and a Sandisk 8MB and neither was recognized by the PowerPak. But then again, I really didn't care much that they weren't.

peppers · Post by **peppers** » Mon Jun 25, 2007 2:42 pm

I think it may be user error on Martin's part what are the chanses of haveing that meny nonfuntional cards

although kingston's are known to be of poor quality and often resolt in errors on all sorts of devices and he said the outhers are very old

note: to those in the US I recamend this

nesworld · Post by **nesworld** » Mon Jun 25, 2007 2:55 pm

peppers wrote:I think it may be user error on Martin's part what are the chanses of haveing that meny nonfuntional cards

although kingston's are known to be of poor quality and often resolt in errors on all sorts of devices and he said the outhers are very old

note: to those in the US I recamend this

User error?! What the!

nesworld · Post by **nesworld** » Mon Jun 25, 2007 3:01 pm

bunnyboy wrote:Can you list the error codes for each card?

Kingston 512MB - error 65
Kodak 4MB - error 01
Canon 32MB (FC-32M) - error 65
Canon 32MB (FC-32MH) - error 04

I have a few more CF card brands on the way, will let you know about those too if you're interested

bunnyboy · Post by **bunnyboy** » Mon Jun 25, 2007 3:16 pm

Definitely wouldn't call that user error, but Windows error

It looks like Windows is using the old dos/chs formats for anything 32MB or under.

01 = FAT12, definitely will not work
04 = FAT16, but CHS mode. The card would likely work anyways if you changed that byte to 06 or 0E.

65 = ??? Could be error reading the first sector. Not sure what would cause that but I can pay postage if you want to mail the card here. Could also try holding down A when you turn power on then release after a few seconds. That will do a software reset of the card.

nesworld · Post by **nesworld** » Tue Jun 26, 2007 8:47 am

Well I picked up an old Canon Ixus2 digital camera at work (it uses CF cards) and formatted the CF using the camera....

tadaaa it now works with the power pak, even after being reformatted in using Windows.

Go figure... maybe the camera does some sort of low level format what do I know?

But fact is, the Kingston CF now works with the PowerPak

Post by **tepples** » Tue Jun 26, 2007 4:45 pm

It's likely that your card originally had a master boot record and partition table, and that your camera just wrote a plain file system.

cd_vision · Post by **cd_vision** » Sun Jul 01, 2007 8:10 am

The card I'm using now is a Toshiba 1GB. Works like a dream, but I've been thinking about trying out something in the area of 4GB or so, that way I don't have to pick and choose what roms I want on the card, I can just throw on my whole collection.

So anybody tested a 4GB card that worked well for them?

No Carrier · Post by **No Carrier** » Sun Jul 01, 2007 3:14 pm

cd_vision wrote:The card I'm using now is a Toshiba 1GB. Works like a dream, but I've been thinking about trying out something in the area of 4GB or so, that way I don't have to pick and choose what roms I want on the card, I can just throw on my whole collection.

So anybody tested a 4GB card that worked well for them?

4GB? Isn't that enough for all existing roms a couple times over? Couldn't you accomplish it with 2GB?

NC

cd_vision · Post by **cd_vision** » Sun Jul 01, 2007 7:26 pm

2GB would come up a bit short for me. My set's got roms from every region though, plus tons of hacks. I could go through and take out all the files I wouldn't use, but then that just goes back to my original issue.