CF card size limitations on external drives?

Hi all-

I just picked up an external CF card on for 2000xl - works great. However, I just noticed that with a 4GB CF card, i can only get my MPC to recognize about 2 GB of it when it is formatting. It recognizes all of the 1 GB card I have...

In the past, I had a 6 GB external HD that worked fine - I could utilize all 6GB of it. So I know the MPC can work with more than 2 GB.

Has anyone else experienced this issue with CF cards and do you know a work around? It isn't the end of the world - just a little annoying, and if I can figure out what is happening, I might be able to double my storage capacity.

thanks-
chris

The MPC2000XL can only use 1GB of any removable media. If you are running v1.14 of the os, you can access up to 9GB of a fixed disk using partitions. But partitions don't exist in v1.20, so all drives are limited to 1GB in that version.

Bottom line - 1GB for your CF cards.

cool - thanks for the reply... only thing is, I can use 2GB of a 4GB CF card - so it seems clear that you can use a CF card that is larger than 1 GB, which seems odd based on your info.

anybody else run into this/have any more info?

What leads you to believe you can use more than 1GB?

loose or break a full 1 gig card =loosing 20 or so beats. loose or break a 4 gig card = you get the picture . i try to stick with 512 mb cards, theyre cheaper too

"what leads you to believe you can use more than a 1 GB card?"

like I said in my post, i can use 2GB of a 4GB card... so that it twice that of the 1GB card.

again, not the end of the world, just wondering if someone has been able to get their MPC to recognize the full capacity of a CF card over 2 GB and if so, how they did it.

thanks-
chris

for sure re: the size - i hear you on losing/breaking the cards... this is simply my back up method, so just looking to archive stuff.

I was asking for specifics - how large are the partitions you have created and how many of them are there? Have you actually saved and then loaded back data from each partition?

you can get used cards for next to nothin also,and they work fine

specifics: using 2KXL with 1.14.

when i use a 1 GB card, I format it into 2 partitions (not even sure if I can only do one partition - didn't see an obvious option), but 2 partitions of just over 500 MB (exact is like 503.5 MB).

on the 4GB card, I format it into 2 partitions of 974.4 MB.

I have used the both partitions to test them out - they appear to work just fine. maybe I am just lucky with these specific cards to be able to get more than 1GB, who knows. Doesn't sound like others can access more than 1 GB.

based on all the feedback, I'll probably just stick to the smaller cards going forward - I just happened to get a sweet deal on these - buy one for $30, get two free with rebate (4GB sandisk extreme III, new) - so i figured they would work out well.

thanks all-
chris

PS- as an aside, i noticed in testing the partitions that my new sandisk cards (4 GB) are waaay faster at reading/writing compared to my 1 GB Lexar card.

Chris, thank you for that information. That is great if you are getting 2GB of useable storage space on that card. I'm beginning to think that the amount of space on the MPC2000 and MPC2000XL varies with the type of card and obviously is not fixed at 1GB as we have always thought.

I have a customer in Germany who installed the CF-CARD drive into his MPC2000 Classic and he is using an 8GB CF card with it. He claims that all 8GB of the CF card formatted and is available in two 4GB partitions. I am skeptical but so far, he tells me it is working great. Now you are getting 2GB out of your CF card with the XL. Very interesting. If these situations end up working out with no corrupt data or problems later on, that would be great. Since the CF-CARD drive isn't hotswappable, being able to get 2, 4 or even 8GB of useable space would be a very nice situation.