Mitsubishi Pedion: No compact flash?

[NeXT]

It's a little out of the "vintage" field as it's not an original Pentium but it's so small I'm just dying to use it.
The original 2gb drive has kicked the bucket and I could not switch to a 4gb Travelstar as it's a tiny bit thicker than the caddy will allow so I tried to fit a 4gb Compact Flash card into the unit using a pin adapter and a 4gb SanDisk card.
With the adapter in it behaved like any laptop would with a missing hard drive but with the card installed it would either hang at POST or still not see the card. I then tried numerous other cards in sizes ranging from 4gb to 32mb and it showed the same problem on all of them. The laptop would only behave if you put a real hard drive in it.
What gives? I thought Compact Flash was pretty much ATA compatible?

 

[glitch]

Not all CF cards are ATA compatible, and those that are may not be fully ATA compatible. To make things more complicated, your BIOS may be doing something weird too. I've had better luck with industrial Flash modules, which you can find in both 40-pin standard IDE and 44-pin 2.5" IDE form factors. With SSDs growing in capacity and dropping in price, the cost of old IDE SSDs is coming down too -- I picked up a tested-good M-Systems 512 MB 2.5" SSD for $5 at the MIT Flea last month (the guy had a pile of them).

 

[Chuck(G)]

You may have better luck with older, smaller CFs as well.

CFs can pose various issues. I just got through installing XP on a CF-to-IDE setup. Since the CF looks to be removable, XP refused to put the swap file on it and quarreled about setting it up with NTFS. Fortunately, there are ways around that although they're a bit involved.

 

[NeXT]

Wow.
Four hours of tinkering yielded:

1: the LCD video connector is fragile and now my screen has a pink tint when it's not having an acid trip, dammit. I don't see a rip in the cable so I'm hoping it's the connector getting cold joints.
2: My Industrial grade SanDisk cards are incompatible.

I remembered I threw the 4gb Compact Flash card I bought for my PC110 project (there was a BIOS limitation that prevented cards larger than 2gb from being seen) into my PS3. It's a cheap and nasty card that cost $10 on ebay but I had not tried it yet. The computer saw it. The computer formatted it. The computer installed to it. It worked.
I'm baffled how the computer has rejected all my high quality cards and was totally okay with this el-cheapo card.

 

[Chuck(G)]

CF cards are weird. It could be that your newer cards are 3.3V only.

On the other hand, I have an off-brand 4GB CF card that boots up fine in a CF-IDE adapter, can't be read in a USB 2.0 adapter, but in a cheap USB 1.1 adapter, it works fine.

 

[glitch]

SanDisk has also purposely broken ATA support in their higher-end CF cards. They figured out people were using them in adapters instead of buying SanDisk SSDs, or something. I think that's limited to the Extreme IV series.