• Please review our updated Terms and Rules here

Acculogic side-1/16

G

gerrydoire

Veteran Member
Joined
Aug 25, 2008
Messages
1,145
In case anyone has come up with a workable solution to this:

Here is my dilema:

I can connect a micro drive or regular ide hd to it and get 500ish megs as expected. They work and boot and all that normal stuff.

What I would like to do is use CF cards, easier to manage and handle than micro hard drives.

When I tried going that route, everything works, except it wont boot from a CF card, when still connected and leave a boot floppy in, it will boot the floppy and i can still go to C:/ on the CF card and everything there looks normal.

I did a formatted the CF card as a normal HD and sys fuction, but my IBM XT refuses to boot from it other than everything else working normally.

So I tried another configuration, I connected the mico drive to the card as the master, and connected the CF card contraption as the slave, the microdrive boots and works, at boot up u see both hds showing up, but fdisk refuses to see the 2nd hd.

You would think if the Acculogic sees a 16 bit physical hd and works, it would see a CF card as being no difference, obviously there is a difference someplace.

If anyone has any ideas on this...
 
different CF

different CF

Have you tried a couple of different CF cards ? Appearantly they're not all created equal. If you search VCM forum, I think there's a thread on it somewhere.
patscc
 
patscc said:
Have you tried a couple of different CF cards ? Appearantly they're not all created equal. If you search VCM forum, I think there's a thread on it somewhere.
patscc
Click to expand...

The one I've tried was a Lexar, can't hurt to try other brands.
 
I bet the problem is coming from the geometry that the CF card is responding with. It is probably causing an overflow somewhere in the Acculogic card. Try hooking a 2GB or 10GB standard IDE to it and see what happens.
 
Last edited:
I don't have a lot of help for you yet, but I wanted to make sure that anyone who has an acculogic card knows the following:

For the PC/XT IDE controller project, I took a copy of the acculogic option ROM BIOS, disassembled it, and upgraded it to support 8.4G drives.

As the PC/XT BIOS continues to evolve, there is absolutely no reason that we can't attempt to support CF cards and CD-ROM. I suspect we may have the same issue on the PC/XT card we're developing, so if I can fix it in software, those updates can then be put back into the original acculogic BIOS.

So, eventually, you will be able to download an updated ROM for your acculogic card, and have all the features that you'd want, including CF, CD-ROM, and 8.4G drives. Just hang in there...
 
kb2syd said:
I bet the problem is coming from the geometry that the CF card is responding with. It is probably causing an overflow somewhere in the Acculogic card. Try hooking a 2GB or 10GB standard IDE to it and see what happens.
Click to expand...

Regular IDE HD's work, even a micro hard drive.
 
hargle said:
I don't have a lot of help for you yet, but I wanted to make sure that anyone who has an acculogic card knows the following:

For the PC/XT IDE controller project, I took a copy of the acculogic option ROM BIOS, disassembled it, and upgraded it to support 8.4G drives.

As the PC/XT BIOS continues to evolve, there is absolutely no reason that we can't attempt to support CF cards and CD-ROM. I suspect we may have the same issue on the PC/XT card we're developing, so if I can fix it in software, those updates can then be put back into the original acculogic BIOS.

So, eventually, you will be able to download an updated ROM for your acculogic card, and have all the features that you'd want, including CF, CD-ROM, and 8.4G drives. Just hang in there...
Click to expand...



Any chance you can burn me a copy of that eeprom of that and send it to me, I can pay for the chip and shipping :D
 
kb2syd said:
Even ones with some big geometry? What is the size of the CF that is failing? What if you put that in a stock 486 computer and use IDE detect. What parameters are returned?
Click to expand...

I tried the acculogic in an XT with 2 laptop hard drives.

1 was 40 gig, one was 2 gig, the 2 gig worked, the 40 didn't at all.

Both are working hard drives in a normal system.

I haven't tried a 128 meg or 512 meg CF cards on it yet, hard to find, if I can get either the 128 meg or 512 meg to work I would be more than happy.

Only so much you can do with an XT computer, so 128-512 megs of space is more than good enough.

I also have a solid state card that has 4 megs of space, very measly even for an 8-bit PC, but its solid state and boots to dos 6.22, it can be upgraded to 128 megs, but not cheap, close to $200 for the card, made by Promdisk.

Promdisk makes these cards for 8-bit isa and PCI slots.
 
Many CF cards format as FAT32 by default, which is probably not bootable on a 5150. I had this problem with a 4GB CF card with my digicam--the camera refused to handle the card, even when the "FORMAT" mode was selected.

However, I popped it into my XP-equipped PC's reader and used FORMAT x: /FS:FAT and the digicam didn't have a problem with it (other than showing the available exposures as 999)

Might-could be a related issue with the CF you've got.
 
Acculogic working and booting a cf card

Acculogic working and booting a cf card

Well I finally got a 128 meg CF Card to test on my Acculogic.

On and IBM XT it booted DOS 7.0 from the card and all works as it should.

I've tried a 2 gig CF, wouldn't boot from the card, have yet to try a 1/2 gig card.

Another note, I also connected up a 2 gig laptop hard drive to the chain as a slave and it came up working fine as drive D:/
a much larger laptop hard drive, wouldn't work at all.
 
Last edited:
I think you'll find anything up to a 340MB microdrive will work fine. The real test is: Will a 512MB CF card work? On my ADP50, it didn't. So I use 340MB microdrives.
 
Trixter said:
I think you'll find anything up to a 340MB microdrive will work fine. The real test is: Will a 512MB CF card work? On my ADP50, it didn't. So I use 340MB microdrives.
Click to expand...

I bought a 512 CF on ebay for $10, once I get it I will tell ya how it goes..
 
Acculogic Speed

Acculogic Speed

Some comparisons using the Acculogic Card

Computer used IBM XT with a 286 8Mhz Orchid Card installed
using Spinrite 2

Here are the results:

2 Gig IBM Travelstar 4LP
Laptop 2.5 HD (Formatted as 1/2)
TRACK-TRACK: 0.87
FULL STROKE: 7.34
RANDOM SEEK: 2.36

128 Meg CF CARD:
TRACK-TRACK: 0.70
FULL STROKE: 0.70
RANDOM SEEK: 0.70

Quantum Fireball 3.5 3200AT:
TRACK-TRACK: 1.09
FULL STROKE: 2.99
RANDOM SEEK: 1.68

Maxtor 13.6GB UDMA/66 7200RPM 2MB IDE Hard Drive 91366U4:
(Amazed the Card even worked with this hard drive)
TRACK-TRACK: 0.70
FULL STROKE: 1.71
RANDOM SEEK: 0.70

The short list....
 
Those are interesting results.

A real, modern hard drive is just as fast as a CF card, except for full stroke, whatever that is. I suspect that is more of a factor of what the bus is capable of doing, not the drive itself, since the numbers were identical otherwise.

The acculogic working on a new drive shouldn't be surprising. There's still a lot of backwards compatibility in drives, although the acculogic card won't let you see more than 528MB of it, but that's a bios limitation only.
 
hargle said:
Those are interesting results.

A real, modern hard drive is just as fast as a CF card, except for full stroke, whatever that is. I suspect that is more of a factor of what the bus is capable of doing, not the drive itself, since the numbers were identical otherwise.

The acculogic working on a new drive shouldn't be surprising. There's still a lot of backwards compatibility in drives, although the acculogic card won't let you see more than 528MB of it, but that's a bios limitation only.
Click to expand...

I could of tried a few other HD's I had, but I can't imagine much better results from any of them over the CF, only worse most likely or the same more or less..

Waiting for a 1/2 GIG CF Card to come in, if that works, I will connect two of them to the card and that should be enough for my XT.

The XT is fully loaded, every slot taken up except for the 8th slot.

AST 6 Pak
Microsoft Mouse Card
IBM CGA Card
286 Orchid Card
Enhanced 1.44/360 Floppy Card
Acculogic IDE Card
Sound Blaster Card REV 1
The MotherBoard has a 8087
The Orchid 286 has a 80287 8mhz

All cards are 8-bit.

Nice thing bout this CF Card, small
light, no moving parts, low power usage
faster, and more capacity, stick it to the
side of anything with velcro can't beat that.

The XT originally came with a 20meg mfm
that died, it was replaced with a 1.44 meg
floppy black to match the 360k IBM
Floppy for asthetics.

What more could a IBM XT ask for...
 
gerrydoire said:
Some comparisons using the Acculogic Card

Computer used IBM XT with a 286 8Mhz Orchid Card installed
using Spinrite 2

Here are the results:

2 Gig IBM Travelstar 4LP
Laptop 2.5 HD (Formatted as 1/2)
TRACK-TRACK: 0.87
FULL STROKE: 7.34
RANDOM SEEK: 2.36
Click to expand...

But where are the burst/sustained transfer rate times? I ask because, on my tests, the ADP50 was able to provide the XT with 300KB/s no matter what was connected (320 MB hard drive or 340MB CF).
 
Trixter said:
But where are the burst/sustained transfer rate times? I ask because, on my tests, the ADP50 was able to provide the XT with 300KB/s no matter what was connected (320 MB hard drive or 340MB CF).
Click to expand...

What verison of Spinrite did you use?
 
Chuck(G) said:
Many CF cards format as FAT32 by default, which is probably not bootable on a 5150. I had this problem with a 4GB CF card with my digicam--the camera refused to handle the card, even when the "FORMAT" mode was selected.

However, I popped it into my XP-equipped PC's reader and used FORMAT x: /FS:FAT and the digicam didn't have a problem with it (other than showing the available exposures as 999)

Might-could be a related issue with the CF you've got.
Click to expand...

it wouldn't have anything to do with it being FAT32. the BIOS really has no concept of partitions and format types. all it does is yank the first 512 bytes of data on the drive, whatever it might be, and attempts to execute it.

the boot code it loads has to understand what the partitions and formats are, because it's it's job to initialize the OS.
 
Mike Chambers said:
it wouldn't have anything to do with it being FAT32. the BIOS really has no concept of partitions and format types. all it does is yank the first 512 bytes of data on the drive, whatever it might be, and attempts to execute it.

the boot code it loads has to understand what the partitions and formats are, because it's it's job to initialize the OS.
Click to expand...

An 8bit XT Card that can read fat32 directly, now there's a project! :sneaky:
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top