So today I constructed my second CF interface and plugged into my MSTE (for the record, it's a scsi2ide intereface, a idecf interface and a cf), partitioned it nicely (well only 1 of the 2 gb are available, but I couldn't find a 1gb card ). Then came the tedious bit: setting it up and copying lots of files to it.

Usually I take the slow way and use ghostlink to copy the files over, but after reading some people mentioning linux on #atariscne, I decided to give it a shot!

There are a few routes you can take. Firsly, the partitioning itself. HDDriver has support for tos/windows compatible partition creation, but then you need to turn byteswap on, and then the drive won't boot on its own! So, after pondering on this a little bit, I decided to toss the idea away, and went for plain Atari partitions! Yay!

After this you can use two methods to access the CF on linux: a) mount it and b)use mtools

(a) was not easily done on my kubuntu setup, as atari partition support needs to be built inside the kernel (or so they say, I haven't given this a try!). So this idea was scrapped too. Which leaves us with...

(b) Using mtools. Now, having seen them a bit in the past, I thought they were NEVER going to work, as the syntax and their use are a bit obscure, to say the least. As I was about to give up on that idea too and fall back to ghostlink, SSB told me that it was quite easy to get it working (Hi Matthias!). In a nutshell you need to:

i) Install mtools if not yet on your system
ii) Find out which device contains your CF. On my machine it happened to be /dev/sdd, so sdd1 and sdd2 were the 2 partitions created on the Mega.
iii) Put the following line in your ~/.mtoolsrc:

mtools_skip_check=1 

iv) Use mtools! For the time being I used two commands, one gives a dir listing, and the other copies stuff into and out of it!

This will give a dir listing of C: (replace sdd1 with whatever device linux will tell you):

mdir -i /dev/sdd1 

This will let you copy a file into the partition from the PC:

mcopy -i /dev/sdd1 file1.ext :: 

And this will copy a whole dir onto the CF:

mcopy -s -i /dev/sdd1 folder/* :: 

And there you have it. Nothing fancy, but does the job brilliantly!

P.S. I mostly wrote this post as a reminder for myself, in case I forget the syntax (which I suspect will be easy )