58 ms·

IDE -> Compact Flash adapters are good for hardware of this era. new CF cards are cheap. Booting from CDROM was still iffy and some BIOS might not like some dr

IDE -> Compact Flash adapters are good for hardware of this era. new CF cards are cheap. Booting from CDROM was still iffy and some BIOS might not like some drives and so on as i recall.

InvaderFizz 5y ago
There are three tools useful on machines of this era: 1. The aforementioned IDE/CF adapter. It helps that it's a dumb PCB since CF speaks IDE natively. 2. A Gotek Floppy Emulator (With the FlashFloppy firmware) 3. A SCSI2SD SCSI emulator.
- DrAwdeOccarim 5y ago
  Commenting to save; this is prime advice right here.
  - hoistbypetard 5y ago
    That Gotek looks like gold. I hadn't heard of it before. The CF-IDE and SCSI-SD are super useful on their own, but the Gotek looks like it works in some places that really lack for options.
accrual 5y ago
Compact Flash cards are indeed pretty useful in old PCs. One just needs to be careful to buy the "industrial" variants that present themselves as a fixed disk to the system. Some operating systems won't install to common consumer CF cards believing them to be removable disks. A handy tool for booting from CD-ROM is Plop Boot Manager. It installs itself into the boot sector and can manage booting from the disk, CD drive, and even USB on systems that ordinarily wouldn't support it. Plus it can be configured to have a cool animated starfield background... https://www.plop.at/en/bootmanager/download.html https://www.plop.at/en/bootmanager/download.html
- blueflow 5y ago
  This sounds wrong. How can a CF card be recognized as "removable"? Do CF cards exist that support ATAPI?
  - accrual 5y ago
    CF cards can operate in three modes: memory mode, PC Card/IO mode, and IDE/fixed disk mode. Since CF cards were originally a type of portable storage for cameras, etc., it makes sense for them to be treated as removable devices. One would plug it into a computer, download the files, then eject the card. The OS would like to know its removable so it can make any writes immediately and not buffer or cache them like it might do for a fixed disk. Some cards, usually marketed as "industrial", support a fixed disk mode. This one for example can be set to fixed disk by grounding pin 9 (output enable): [PDF] https://resources.winsystems.com/datasheets/cflash-g-xxxm-i-ds.pdf https://resources.winsystems.com/datasheets/cflash-g-xxxm-i-...
marttt 5y ago
+1, this has been keeping my old Thinkpad T42 running in silence for years. Great write-up about testing different CF cards on a Thinkpad X40 in 2013: https://www.daniel-boehmer.de/thinkpad-cf/ https://www.daniel-boehmer.de/thinkpad-cf/

IDE -> Compact Flash adapters are good for hardware of this era. new CF cards are cheap. Booting from CDROM was still iffy and some BIOS might not like some drives and so on as i recall.

InvaderFizz 5y ago

There are three tools useful on machines of this era: 1. The aforementioned IDE/CF adapter. It helps that it's a dumb PCB since CF speaks IDE natively. 2. A Gotek Floppy Emulator (With the FlashFloppy firmware) 3. A SCSI2SD SCSI emulator.

DrAwdeOccarim 5y ago
Commenting to save; this is prime advice right here.
- hoistbypetard 5y ago
  That Gotek looks like gold. I hadn't heard of it before. The CF-IDE and SCSI-SD are super useful on their own, but the Gotek looks like it works in some places that really lack for options.

accrual 5y ago

Compact Flash cards are indeed pretty useful in old PCs. One just needs to be careful to buy the "industrial" variants that present themselves as a fixed disk to the system. Some operating systems won't install to common consumer CF cards believing them to be removable disks. A handy tool for booting from CD-ROM is Plop Boot Manager. It installs itself into the boot sector and can manage booting from the disk, CD drive, and even USB on systems that ordinarily wouldn't support it. Plus it can be configured to have a cool animated starfield background... https://www.plop.at/en/bootmanager/download.html https://www.plop.at/en/bootmanager/download.html

blueflow 5y ago
This sounds wrong. How can a CF card be recognized as "removable"? Do CF cards exist that support ATAPI?
- accrual 5y ago
  CF cards can operate in three modes: memory mode, PC Card/IO mode, and IDE/fixed disk mode. Since CF cards were originally a type of portable storage for cameras, etc., it makes sense for them to be treated as removable devices. One would plug it into a computer, download the files, then eject the card. The OS would like to know its removable so it can make any writes immediately and not buffer or cache them like it might do for a fixed disk. Some cards, usually marketed as "industrial", support a fixed disk mode. This one for example can be set to fixed disk by grounding pin 9 (output enable): [PDF] https://resources.winsystems.com/datasheets/cflash-g-xxxm-i-ds.pdf https://resources.winsystems.com/datasheets/cflash-g-xxxm-i-...

marttt 5y ago

+1, this has been keeping my old Thinkpad T42 running in silence for years. Great write-up about testing different CF cards on a Thinkpad X40 in 2013: https://www.daniel-boehmer.de/thinkpad-cf/ https://www.daniel-boehmer.de/thinkpad-cf/