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CF cards and 486 notebooks - Compaq Contura 430cx and others

Sandisk78

Experienced Member
Joined
Apr 2, 2016
Messages
111
Location
Moscow, Russia
Hi, people ! Had issue with a 486DX4-100 Compq Contura 430cx notebook - it was hanging when adressing HDD. One kind person agreed to re-solder its HDD conector, even without asking money for it. After that it was hanging with Trndscend 2gb x133 card. I tried another card, old 512mb Kingstone (bought once with Canon 20D camera). Once I've seen a discussion in the internet that some CF cards don't work quite well with 486 systems and some work fine. I use adapter IDE->CF. Can anyone share the expirience of using CF cards and such machines ?
 
I've had awful luck with both CF and SD disk replacements all across the board in speed, bizarre stability and compatibility issues. Most of the time CF cards do weird things because their native ATA mode confuses older BIOSes with internal LBA modes as opposed to CHS addressing or with SD disk emulation not being perfect. I gave up and went back to spinning media.
 
I find on machines where you can manually enter CHS information for the hard drive configuration, you can usually fudge the numbers to make a CF/SD card work on an adapter. Machines with auto detection and no way to modify the drive information usually have poor outcomes.

The only thing about fudging numbers is make sure you write them down in case the BIOS config gets wiped, else you'll lose everything on the drive.
 
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