Coaxing a Pentium II to use a CF adaptor

[VMSZealot]

Okay. I'm hanging my head in shame, and thanking you all for your patience (and for managing not to call me an f'ing eejit). All I needed to do was try a different CF card (1GB), and power it via a cable. It's working. And I am clearly a bit of a fool! Thank you all.

 

[Zare]

Hey no shame in asking!
Just a few days ago I was repairing my XT CF Lite and it seemed the jumped BIOS address doesn't correspond to actual address in runtime, and some DIP configs hang the entire PC. I was about to post that here and then I realized online description I looked doesn't fit, and there's a fine print of the settings on the back of the card which ofc work normally

 

[hunterjwizzard]

CF cards exist in 3 different modes. Only what is referred to as True IDE mode supports having 2 drives on the same channel. The PC Card Memory Mode and PC Card I/O mode ground the Drive Select pin so those cards have no way of knowing which card is being accessed. Cheaper cards that are not intended for use in a computer do not implement True IDE mode.

So in theory these WD SiliconDrives should work fine with 2 drives on a cable. Its not that often that one needs such a thing, but its there.

That is described on page 27 of the CF 2.0 specification.

Hey, no spoilers! I'm only on page 13!

 

[hunterjwizzard]

Okay. I'm hanging my head in shame, and thanking you all for your patience (and for managing not to call me an f'ing eejit). All I needed to do was try a different CF card (1GB), and power it via a cable. It's working. And I am clearly a bit of a fool! Thank you all.

Once you get it all set up you might try imaging the 1gb card to the card that didn't work, it may now that everything is configured correctly.

In my CF IDE experiments, I could only get the aforementioned PATA cards to work for initial setup(creating partitions, making bootable, etc). Then I use Win32 Disk Imager and image the drive to another CF card and expand the partition to fill the card. So far I've gotten every card I've tried to work this way even if I could not make it work starting from scratch.

 

[russell--]

I've been playing CF card bingo recently. I have a few machines I've been trying to swap CF cards between. One small revelation I encountered last night was that a 128MB CF card that I had installed from floppies on a Socket 7 motherboard (ASUS P55T2P4 v3.0) would boot fine in that machine, but if I moved it to a Socket 370 (Intel D815EPVF or something) with a Celeron 1GHz, I got a "Missing operating system" message. I can boot from an MSDOS 6.2 floppy and then C: to the CF drive, but it refuses to boot. I tried multiple combinations of IDE configurations in the BIOS settings. I then tried a 512MB CF card in the default-configured-bios on the Socket 370 board, and re-installed MS-DOS 6.2 from floppies locally and *that* booted there. I then tried the prepared 512MB CF card back in the Socket 7 motherboard, and I got a "Missing operating system" message there ... when the bios was configured for LBA! If I switched the BIOS settings on the Socket 7 motherboard to "NORMAL" (by which I assume it means CHS), the 512MB CF card booted fine. I have been unable to find a BIOS configuration on the Socket 370 that lets the, apparently LBA formatted 128MB CF card to boot on it.