User`s manual

sometimes it seems that the SD cards or the GigaFile won't work correctly. The following things
were found during intensive testing.
1. SDSC cards with block sizes greater 512Byte: Some SD cards seem not to handle blocks of
512 bytes. This does not conform to the SD card specification. Among these are, for
example, 2GB SDSC cards. The SDSC specification reserves 12 Bit addresses and a
maximum multiplication factor of 512. So there are a maximum of 2¹² * 512 = 2.097.152
blocks. To create 2GB cards, the blocks size is not 512MB but 1024 MB. Those cards are not
possible to operate in the GigaFile. Use SDHC cards instead.
2. During the boot process from the GigaFile, the transmission data rate of the connected
computer will be measured as described above. This is to allow the TOS operating system to
boot from the card correctly. The reason for this feature is a race condition in TOS. Booting
from hard drives is not possible if the data is read too slow or too fast. Although the GigaFile
is developed carefully and with intensive testing to meet this requirement, there is no
guarantee that all the different hardware will boot from SD card in every case. A workaround
is to use HDDRIVER booted from a floppy disk drive or from another hard disk connected
to the IDE port, which can be found in STEs, Stacys or STBooks.
3. The GigaFile supports the HDDRIVER option, Fast ACSI. If HDDRIVER is used with this
setting, the read and write transmission data rate is about 15% higher.
4. If big SD cards are connected and partitioned with HDDRIVER, there is a need for the
option, ICD compatibility. Otherwise partitions which are located beyond the 1GB limit are
not detected and there is no way to access them. In this case HDDIVER gives a warning
during the boot process, “Error while reading the partition data“.
5. Even if more than one partition is installed with TOS/Win compatibility during partitioning
with HDDRIVER, the Windows operating system detects only the first one. This is not an
error, but more a poor feature of Windows.
6. During Partitioning or Formatting the SD cards, there are unwanted warnings or errors: in
this case have a look on the write protection slider of the inserted SD card. Perhaps it is (by
accident) switched to write protection.
Page 9