Chuck(G)
25k Member
It occurred to me after a couple of posts that many people with XTA (8-bit IDE) controllers aren't aware that most most CF cards support 8-bit transfers. I suspect this is because that the old XTA drives just worked in 8-bit mode by default, but CF cards and ATA2 drives need to be told to get into 8-bit mode.
So I took my 17-year old drive sniffing program and modified it to tell you if your drive will work in 8 bit mode. Find it as an attachment--run it under DOS or shutdown Windows 9X to MS-DOS mode. You can't run it on Windows NT, 2K, XP, Vista or 7--and it will tell you that. It works only on controllers on standard primary ports (32x for the XT MFM controllers and 1Fx for AT MFM, IDE and ESDI controllers). Sorry, no SCSI support.
So if IDESDI tells you that your drive (and this includes most CF drives) will work in 8 bit mode, how do you put them in that mode?
Well, you can patch your hard drive BIOS to issue the following command sequence:
If AL comes back 00, the drive is in 8-bit mode. If AL comes back as 04, then the drive doesn't support 8-bit commands.
This should give some folks something to chew on at any rate.
So I took my 17-year old drive sniffing program and modified it to tell you if your drive will work in 8 bit mode. Find it as an attachment--run it under DOS or shutdown Windows 9X to MS-DOS mode. You can't run it on Windows NT, 2K, XP, Vista or 7--and it will tell you that. It works only on controllers on standard primary ports (32x for the XT MFM controllers and 1Fx for AT MFM, IDE and ESDI controllers). Sorry, no SCSI support.
So if IDESDI tells you that your drive (and this includes most CF drives) will work in 8 bit mode, how do you put them in that mode?
Well, you can patch your hard drive BIOS to issue the following command sequence:
Code:
BAF101 MOV DX,01F1
B001 MOV AL,01
EE OUT DX,AL
B0EF MOV AL,EF
BAF701 MOV DX,01F7
EE OUT DX,AL
BAF101 MOV DX,01F1
EC IN AL,DX
If AL comes back 00, the drive is in 8-bit mode. If AL comes back as 04, then the drive doesn't support 8-bit commands.
This should give some folks something to chew on at any rate.