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Adding a CF Card to a Tandy 1500HD

J

jwse30

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Sep 2, 2013
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A few weeks ago (at VCFMW) a Tandy 1500HD followed me home. The hard drive was working at the show, but the floppy was untested. It naturally needed a new drive belt. The next day, the hard drive took a few tries to boot up the machine, and the day after that it no longer would. The seller really got the most use for that drive :D

So I ordered a CF adapter and a 32m card and they both arrived this past week. So yesterday I opened the laptop up, and about a thousand screws later, I had the floppy drive's belt replaced and a the CF adapter and card installed. After reassembly (didn't look like a very smart idea to try to fire this one up partially assembled due to the very short display cable. So the floppy drive works well for the most part (I think I have a combination of a bad USB drive and questionable disks; If I leave both of those out of the equation, this drive reads, writes, and formats fine), but the "hard drive" doesn't exist according to MS-DOS.

One thing I didn't do (should have, hindsight being 20/20) is plug the card into a reader and make sure it worked. FDISK and CHKDISK do not find the card. I am using DOS 6.22, so capacity shouldn't be an issue. I ran the 1500hd.exe setup program, but that doesn't have any options for the hard drive, aside from how long before it puts it to sleep.

Anyone have any hints, tips, or tricks to make this work. It seems like it'll be a fun little dos machine if I can get a hard drive in it. I'd like to eventually replace the floppy with something a bit more modern, but it's working for now.

Thanks in advance,

J White
 
I don't know anything about Tandy 1500's, but from the quick amount of reading I just did, it seems that it uses an XT-IDE drive, the same as the Tandy 1000 series. If that's correct, you can't just use an IDE to CF adapter. Some quick Googling doesn't return any results (at least for me) on adding a CF card to that computer.
 
Sorry to revive in old thread, did you ever get this working? I was able to get it working on a Tandy 1800HD (286 Variant) of this machine.
 
I found this today as well. I also don't understand what incompatibility could come from "XT-IDE drive" I'm guessing the poster meant "IDE drive," as, afaik "XT-IDE" is a name of a modern retro enhancement only. Maybe the poster didn't know that Type I and Type II CompactFlash cards can be connected to any system with an IDE interface? Although non-UDMA cards are not generally bootable when used with an IDE adapter.
Or does the poster know something I don't?
 
What was meant is that it uses XTA, not ATA or standard IDE. Standard IDE is a 16-bit interface, which makes sense - AT Attachment, as it were, and the PC AT used a 16-bit data bus on the 80286.

The 1500HD has a V20 CPU, which is an improved 8088, but like an 8088, it has only an 8-bit data bus. While I believe there did exist a few actual-IDE controllers for 8-bit ISA slots, the 1500HD has no such animal, and uses XTA, an 8-bit subset of ATA, which is not fully compatible. Most CF cards won't speak XTA. You might find a few that will, but absent that, good luck.

Some IDE-SD adapters, which have an active converter chip, might speak XTA, but I don't know offhand of any that do. Best bet would probably be building something with an Arduino or the like to speak XTA on one side and ATA or SD on the other.
 
docangle said:
Sorry to revive in old thread, did you ever get this working? I was able to get it working on a Tandy 1800HD (286 Variant) of this machine.
Click to expand...
Since that has a 286 CPU, I bet it has an actual 16-bit ISA bus and actual 16-bit ATA, which a CF card should talk to adroitly.
 
jade_nekotenshi said:
Since that has a 286 CPU, I bet it has an actual 16-bit ISA bus and actual 16-bit ATA, which a CF card should talk to adroitly.
Click to expand...

I can say with certainty that the 1800HD does indeed have a typical laptop drive interface, and it should absolutely work with a CF-to-IDE adaptor, having actually done this myself with an 1800HD.
 
Paralel said:
I can say with certainty that the 1800HD does indeed have a typical laptop drive interface, and it should absolutely work with a CF-to-IDE adaptor, having actually done this myself with an 1800HD.
Click to expand...
Same for me as well, I have a 1800HD that works great with a laptop style CF Adapter.
 
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