Okay, you got your SD4ST Device, so what’s next?

1. What is SD4ST?

SD4ST Device is an interface that allows to read SD cards and present them to ATARI ST/STE as a hard drive using ACSI port (DB19 Socket in back of your ATARI). The ACSI protocol is a cut-down, simplified version of SCSI protocol.

2. SD Card with partition(s), files sytem(s), boot sector and driver,

SDCard

To start you need one SD mini Card (SDHC or SDXC) minimum of 1GB (but no more than 64GB – its pointless to have big SD due to the software limitations).

Partitions

You need at least one to boot ATARI ST. The partition needs to be bootable. Atari reads first sector from HDD (SD) and if its mark as bootable then executes small code written to boot sector allowing to load hdd driver.

The Driver

The HDD Driver must be installed. It’s the main piece of software that allows ATARI to perform disk operations such as reads&writes files, or maintain file directory structures. There are few available HDD drivers for Atari: ICD Pro, PP HDD or HDDriver. Some of them are free, some are commercial.

3. Use Precreated HDD image for start.

I know that can be quite daunting at the start to do everything on our own from scratch, so I would recommend starting with existing precreated images. You simply burn the image to your card put it to SD4ST and off you go!

You have running hdd.