What I forgot to tell you

Last night, before finishing up, I decided to test the CF IDE adaptor. I plugged in an old 32mb CF card, turned on the drive, turned on the 64 and tried to access the card. Nothing.

Aftering checking jumpers, moving jumpers, testing the card in a pc, checking wiring and spending way longer than I had realised I was still not able to access the card. The hard drive was fine, no probs there, but the card, nope.

So tonight, before I did anything, i decided to work that out. This time I connected it up to my PC using an IDE to USB adaptor, plugged into the CF to IDE adaptor. Nothing. I even tried a different CF card, a more modern 2gb unit, nope, nothing.

I decided that maybe the USB adaptor was causing a problem in the test, so I connected the CF IDE directly to an IDE port on my PC, set it to master, and bingo! it works!

Feeling cocky, I decided to run an ide lead from the hard drive I was using , to the CF IDE and then finally into the PC. With the hard drive set as master and the CF IDE as slave I was was able to see both units in Windows on my PC.

So, knowing that I had the cabling and master/slave jumper arrangements taken care of, I disconnected the lot from the PC and reconnected them to the uIEC controller, applied power, turned on the c64 and.............. NO CF CARD, ARRRgghh!!!

It was at this point I decided it was a uIEC issue, most likely I figured, I had not set it up correctly for two IDE devices.

So off I went to the uIEC google group and started going through the previous posts when I came across a post from Jim Brain saying you have to configure uIEC to look for a second IDE device with the @"XD1=1" command, followed by @"XW" to save the new configuration.

Sure enough, after issuing that command and power cycling the uIEC and issuing the JiffyDOS command @$=P I was greeted with the above!

Ok, so it makes sense, the volume label for the hard drive is C64 and the volume label for the CF card is STUFF.

It all works!!

The next step is to screw it all together properly and put the case back on, finally, so it looks like a regular c64 drive. Now the fun stuff starts, I get to use it, hehe.