CF Card Conundrum

[Rick Ethridge]

I've been experimenting with an IDE to CF card adapter on my Gateway Anigma 166 MMX motherboard. It's funny that MS Windows 98 or above won't install to an 8 gig CF card by Kingston. I read something about the cards being recognized as removable rather than a fixed disk. How does this effect installing MSDOS, AmigaDOS or Linux. Is there anyway of changing the card through software and, of course, how?

 

[KC9UDX]

I'm not sure AmigaOS cares . I've installed various versions on several other "removable" types. So long as there's an RDB, or explicit support for the media type in the controller, the OS will work.
Even if it's not bootable, you can boot to something else and transfer booting to some newly mounted device.
But that doesn't really answer your question...

 

[Chuck(G)]

Yup, but there are some workarounds to deal with the RMB bit in the IDENTIFY command return:

http://www.thinkwiki.org/wiki/CompactFlash_boot_drive

Maybe not what you'd like, but it's a starting point.

 

[Ole Juul]

How does this effect installing MSDOS . . .

I run my main DOS machine on a Kingston 8gb CF card. It's not lightening fast, but it's pretty quick - and certainly quiet. Always on, and glitch free for a couple of years now.

 

[RWallmow]

There are some industrial CF cards that identify as fixed, or have a software package that lets you toggle between removable and fixed. I know there is a sandisk tool floating around the seedier parts of the internet that lets you toggle on SOME of their CF cards.

As far as DOS, I've never seen any version care, just Win9x and later that requires fixed disk mode.

 

[Chuck(G)]

Look at my post above yours--the SanDisk tool is pretty difficult to find.

 

[RWallmow]

Look at my post above yours--the SanDisk tool is pretty difficult to find.

I should have read the link ;-)

Funny I never saw that page before, and that's exactly how I learned about the Sandisk tool researching trying to use one as a hard drive in an X41 tablet years back (I did successfully get a 8gb sandisk card working, but ditched that whole X41 setup in favor of the X61 I have now).

 

[Chuck(G)]

When it comes to Win98, I wonder if the 32-bit Windows driver has to be used or if, as in Win95, the real-mode (DOS/BIOS) driver can be used. It'd be a big performance hit, but no worse than Windows 3.0.

It's been ages since I've looked at the Win98 DDK, but I wonder if they included the 32-bit driver source in that one, so one could patch it.

So what happens if you boot into DOS first (MSDOS.SYS BootGUI=0), then enter Win98 via the "win" command?

 

[Krille]

I read something about the cards being recognized as removable rather than a fixed disk.

Maybe this post will be useful?