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CF not working in 1000tx??

Mike Chambers

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Sep 2, 2006
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everything appears to be set correctly on my WD IDE 8-bit controller. i know this 256 MB kingston card i got supports 8-bit access mode, and so does the CF-IDE adapter. i made sure before i ordered them.

i installed the CF-IDE adapter and put the CF card on it, right where the 20 MB hard drive was connected to the card... turned it on, nothing! it doesn't have any clue that a drive is present. i verified this with FDISK which says it can't find any fixed disks. just to be sure it wasn't some weird tandy incompatibility, i pulled the whole card out, and put it in one of my 8088's. same thing. the 8088 actually gives me the 1701 drive controller error on boot. everything works when i just plug the original hard drive back into the card.

the CF-IDE adapter IS set for master/single. help, this sucks! :mad:
 
Is your adapter known working? Is the card know working?

well i suppose i should test that, but i just opened the sealed plastic cases a few hours ago and put them right into the tandy. i will see what happens. they should be fine.
 
Perhaps the T1K's BIOS only recognizes a few different drive types. I'd try using a drive overlay like Ontrack Disk Manager to fool the BIOS into thinking it's looking at the correct drive parameters.

--T
 
Sounds like my fears were justified -- CF cards, even in 8-bit mode, are ATA devices, and by the look of things an XTA controller can't handle them.

While I haven't seen a schematic of your controller, I have seen ones for the motherboard XTA controllers in the Amstrad 3086 and 5086. Those certainly wouldn't be able to access an ATA drive even with a reprogrammed ROM, because they don't connect up the DA2 line and so wouldn't be able to write to the ATA command register.
 
I have the same problem with my Tandy 1000 TL/2. The old HDD bit the platters(nice deep gouges).I got a CF card adapter and with a 32M card, the TL/2 would not acknowlage the card with the original Motherboard IDE adapter. I wound up turning off the on board controller and used a 8 bit IDE card. I guess with the better BIOS on the IDE card I got the CF card adapter working.
One thing I found out is you will need to FDISK the CF card and format with the DOS you are going to use from the system its going to go in.

As JohnEillot said "... -- CF cards, even in 8-bit mode, are ATA devices, and by the look of things an XTA controller can't handle them..."

You have answered my question of why I could not get any other HDDs working on the Tandy 1000tl/2 motherboard IDE controller!! Bummer.... but at least I got the CF card and off board 8 bit IDE controller working!
 
Well...before giving up perhaps there's something else you might want to look into.

I had a hell of a time getting my Sandisk Ultra II card working in my XT. But...my setup is a little bit more complicated than yours, since I use a SCSI card, and have a special adapter to read ATA drives. No matter what I did, I could not get the damn CF card to be recognised by my SCSI card.

The solution to the problem turned out to be annoying, yet easy to fix. It seems that the Sandisk cards by default are configured to used "removable disk" mode, rather than "fixed disk" mode. Using special software, I was able to switch the card into "fixed disk" mode which magically solved all of my problems. This software only works with Sandisk cards though.

I'm not sure what brand of CF you are using, but it is my understanding that a lot of them are set to "removable disk" mode. I'm not sure if you can change that on all of them however. Anyway, you should look into this before you give up.
 
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