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DOS Support for SD cards?

T

Tupin

Experienced Member
Joined
Jun 7, 2009
Messages
436
Location
St. Louis, MO
I got a PCMCIA adapter so I could transfer large files over to my 486 laptop, but I'm not sure which drive it will see it as and I probably need a driver. It's an MCR-5A, the ones commonly used for similar ways on Amiga 600s and 1200s.
 
With a PCMCIA Socket Services driver (depends on your chipset, but the Phoenix one [somewhat hard to find] is supposed to work with most/all) you should be able to get it to read as a PCMCIA memory card (they used to make those).. This is a bit guesswork, though, since I've never worked with a PCMCIA->SD adapter nor PCMCIA storage.
 
Tupin said:
...I'm not sure which drive it will see it as and I probably need a driver.
Click to expand...

In tandem with what Raven said, most likely when you load the driver (if you can find one), you will see a message alerting you to what drive letter it was assigned. Just about every DOS driver for any kind of specialized drive (e.g. CD-ROM, ZIP, etc.) will do this.
 
I've also got the MCR-5A super cheap eBay card.

Playing with it in Win98SE on a Toughbook CF-25, the removable media is in fact translated into an emulated IDE controller. From within Win98, FDISK can see it as exactly that: an IDE/ATA hard drive.

Soooo...once you get the PCMCIA driver out of the way, the rest should be pretty simple.
 
Speaking of that, I guess I should just install Windows 95, but after downloading a boot disk, it doesn't work because of a banana CD IDE driver or something, which I never want to use anyway...
 
If you just wait it should pass that part of the boot sequence - assuming that it's some fluke or glitch, put the boot disk in another machine and delete or rename autoexec.bat and config.sys - this will stop them from loading the CD drivers (and other things) but if you're not using a CD drive for the install that should be fine anyway.

I suggest this rather than editing because it is easier if you don't know what you're doing with the files (and I presume you don't, since you can't remove the BANANA driver - no offense meant here).
 
None of those files are on the bootdisk I'm using. It says "Starting Windows 95" and then goes to the banana driver thing, gives an error, and then goes to an A: prompt.

I found another disk, I'll try this one.
 
Okay, I deleted the config and autoexec files, and now it just says "Starting Windows 95" and goes to an A: prompt.
 
Apparently you're unfamiliar with what a Windows 95/98/ME "boot disk" is going to do; it is really not much different than a DOS boot disk (and, in the most literal sense, is a "DOS 7.x" boot disk.) It's not going to boot a whole Windows shell. They're just used to get into the system to either perform maintenance or bootstrap the Windows install (hence why you typically need to load a CD-ROM driver!)
 
So, where do I go from here? Find the install floppies and install Windows 95? I got a drive today, a 6GB one, by the way.
 
Yes if you have install floppies for Win95, put them in after you get a prompt and run the install. Provided the hard drive in question is partitioned and formatted anyway..
 
Formatted the drive and told it to go to it's highest partition option, and it gave me a 59MB partition and refused to let me make any more.
 
Your partition size is determined by your system's mobo BIOS. Check to ensure that you have entered the correct parameters for your particular HD. I have an old Maxtor IDE running WIN95 at about 8.4 GB.
 
One possibility could be there are other partitions on the drive, and you just happened to have 59MB of free space. If you're comfortable with FDISK, I would be curious if FDISK shows any other partitions on the drive.

If you don't care about what's on the drive, you can always run FDISK, delete all partitions on the drive, and then create the largest partition it will allow you.
 
Perhaps a silly question, but is it possible the hard drive actually has 59MB usable capacity?

Not half as unlikely as some might expect...

Also check in the CMOS setup for the 'mode' the drive is being detected in. Switch that around and see if the detected capacity changes (in the BIOS, that is).
 
There's a good chance this is a BIOS glitch; likely it's using CHS and the cylinder overflowed coming out to an apparent tiny drive. You may need a software BIOS to override it and a cylinder limit jumper on the HDD.
 
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