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What compact flash adaptor and card to use with XT-IDE?

As Malc says, the BIOS is essentially hacked to work with this adapter, at this point. I will at some point undertake the proper modifications and submit these back to the project owner (of course anyone is welcome to jump in too!). Essentially there is a conflict between the adapter needing the XT-CF BIU mode - which is based on 8-bit media transfer mode - and the media needing to not be in 8-bit mode. None of the CompactFlash cards are detected because the BIOS is putting them into 8-bit mode, then finding half the data missing when reading via 16-bit IO.

I'd be very interested to know which spinning drives are not properly detected however?
 
Thanks for your answers,
then i unfortunally bought the wrong board.
I want to have the XT-IDE to exchange files between modern and vintage PCs.
I test again my vintage IDE drives and found no drive, that doesn't work.
My oldest drive is a 1992 WD Tidbit 60, which is also working fine.

Frank
 
All is not lost! I'll take a look at the BIOS code today and see if it can be fixed.
 
Please try this version - hopefully it will work with your CompactFlash cards. Please let me know!

Please can you also post the exact model number of the 'vintage IDE' drive that didn't work? The WDAH260 appears to pre-date ATA-2, hence probably doesn't have the 8-bit mode issue present in the first-cut BIOS.
 
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Many thanks James,
one of my CF cards are recognized from the XT-BIOS (Kinston 4GB "CF/4GB")
I am able to permanently delete the existing partition table and to make a primary and extended new one.
After restart there isn't any partition anymore.
With which CF card you tested?
As i wrote in post #22, i found no real IDE drive, that doesn't work.

Frank
 
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Thanks, good to know that spinning drives are all working!

For CompactFlash, it may be power related. Try providing power directly to the card - I found only yesterday that pin-20 provided power is implemented very badly on these adapters, providing only 4.3V or so to the card. I have tested Kingston cards and also SanDisk. Another thing to try is clearing the MBR completely using my WipeDisk utility (and then reboot, before partitioning).
 
Sorry James,
No success at all with CF cards. I had tried all your suggestions, trying three different IDE-CF card adapters.
Frank
 
James,
I tried both versions (IDE_XT.BIN and IDE_XTP.BIN).
Tomorrow i try to use an other PC for testing (actually an IBM 5162).
Frank
 
Frank S said:
one of my CF cards are recognized from the XT-BIOS (Kinston 4GB "CF/4GB") I am able to permanently delete the existing partition table and to make a primary and extended new one. After restart there isn't any partition anymore.....
Click to expand...

FWIW i had that same problem with one of my XT-IDE R1 cards a long time ago, I also deleted the partition and set up new partitions which went successfully or so i thought, Upon reboot the CF card was raw, No partitions existed, It actually turned out to be a chip gone bad, It was either a 688 or 245 I can't remember which now though. I replaced the chip and it's been working fine ever since.
 
But it works with all real HDDs i tried.
Is there really a great different in TTL levels between real HDDs and CF cards?
Frank
 
Yes, CF cards use CMOS levels. However the adapter is using HCT throughout, for that reason.
 
I don't know, I don't remember trying a real HDD at that time, It was in one of my XT's which uses CF.
 
I got some time to do some more development with the Lo-tech 8-bit IDE Adapter and CompactFlash cards. I performed testing in a 5150 with a CompactFlash adapter directly attached (no ribbon cable) and powered via pin 20.

Using the second BIOS version (here, contains the same code as already posted on page 3), the adapter finds and seems to perform normally with a Hitatchi 128MB card and a Kingston 4GB card. I attached a scope to the 5V line at pin 20, and found about 50mV noise (peak-to-peak), actually accessing the media reduced the noise observed (for whatever reason). The worst noise I observed was caused by the PC speaker!

So I'm not sure this really helps much. There seems to be enough power available and enough noise filtering, and in my testing it all worked just fine. I cleared a card with WipeDisk, then using DOS 6.22 created and formatted a partition, copied over some test utilities, rebooted from the freshly formatted cards, the ran performance and pattern tests without any problems found.
 
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