I decided to revive one of my old K6-2 machines with a Syba brand CF-to-IDE adapter and a 8GB card. I ran across a problem installing Windows 2000 on it. Apparently Windows somehow detects these adapters as genuine removable devices as opposed to a classic hard drive, and won't let you partition the drive with more then one partition. The motherboard is an Asus P5A-B with the latest BIOS update. I guess somewhere in the ATA spec these cards can tell the machine they are hot swappable despite the instructions telling you otherwise! The real kicker of all this... the CF card is SLOWER then a period hard drive in the machine. Yes, the card was operating at UltraDMA (ATA-33), but writes are really really slow. The card I'm using is a Transend "x133" 8GB CF card that advertises that it can be used to record HD video. I guess I'm not buying that brand again.
On a related note, Windows XP refused to install on this machine. The setup program kept kicking back cryptic "out of virtual memory" error messages when installing COM+ and other stuff. Also Windows Update is seriously broken in both Windows 98SE and Windows 2000 nowadays. In 98SE the page wouldn't even come up, and 2000 kept kicking back that I need to be logged in as administrator to run it (despite being logged in as Administrator!). This was after installing IE6 on both OSes.
On a related note, Windows XP refused to install on this machine. The setup program kept kicking back cryptic "out of virtual memory" error messages when installing COM+ and other stuff. Also Windows Update is seriously broken in both Windows 98SE and Windows 2000 nowadays. In 98SE the page wouldn't even come up, and 2000 kept kicking back that I need to be logged in as administrator to run it (despite being logged in as Administrator!). This was after installing IE6 on both OSes.
