[NTLK] ATA Cards: the situation

From: Paul Guyot (pguyot_at_kallisys.net)
Date: Tue Nov 05 2002 - 04:03:30 EST


Hi all,

I've just investigated later on two cards I bought that have issues
(well, one of them used to work).

But first, let me talk about the bug known as the -10606 bug or "what
did you do, it worked with beta 10" syndrome.
This bug is the following: the card wouldn't be partitioned. There is
some big positive number error and then a -10606.

This bug is Newton-related, not card-related. The 16 MB Pretec CF
card I've bought works in my Newtons but not in Christian Nicoletti's
MP2100. His card doesn't work in his Newton like Harri Hohteri's and
Jeremy Bond Shepherd's, but they work in mine.
I've heard that brainwiping one's Newton fixes the problem. Please
don't do that. I mean to fix that bug without that workaround, and if
everyone brainwipe their Newtons, there wouldn't be anyone left to
test my fixes :)

Now, the Smart Media card. This Smart Media card used to work, so it
seems that I've toasted it somehow, probably nervously playing at
inserting and ejecting it from the adapter. I'll test it in my
father's Ti next week-end. Fortunately, there is a one year warranty
:)

But, today's interesting discovery is that ATA Support isn't told
that a card is there. Actually, to be told that a card is there, the
NewtonOS's internal non-working ATA driver has to say -10582
(kError_ATA_No_Partition). If it returns another error, the NewtonOS
doesn't ask the third party card handlers *at all*.

So if you disable ATA Support and you insert your card and you don't
get a -10582 error, then ATA Support can't do anything for you *yet*.
I'll try to find a way to bypass this issue. (The thing with my smart
media is that now, I get a -10059, probably because it's toasted. I
bypassed that step with the debugger and it wouldn't identify itself).

The other card that doesn't work is an SD card. I didn't know much
about SDs when I bought it, the guy said it was like a MMC but secure
because of the lock switch and faster, so I bought it. I was
misleaded. SD cards apparently use a superset of the ATA (or MMC?)
protocol which isn't documented anywhere (well, maybe except if you
pay 1,500 USD for the regular membership :-), so unless someone here
has some notions of what I have to do to actually read a sector, I
won't support SD cards. Also, they're only faster if you use the
specific SD commands. Plus it seems that if you reformat them, you
get serious issues.

If you want the details, when I insert the card, the identification
works perfectly (the adapter says it's an adapter and a compact flash
card), but I wait forever for the card to answer to my read request
(read and identify commands are based on the same protocol).

In a nutshell, be careful with your SmartMedia cards and don't buy SD
cards for the Newton :)
Other than that, every standard card should work. However, some cards
seem to be abnormally slow and they might have issues. This was the
case of my smart media, and now, all my cards are fast :-/

Paul

-- 
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