First post, by copper
- Rank
- Newbie
I'm posting this so nobody else wastes six hours of their life.
I have an XT-IDE rev 04 (c) I'm using with an XT-class machine, a Leading Edge Model D with an Intel 8088 and Phoenix BIOS 3.0. I wanted to use micro sdcards instead of the obsolete CF format. I bought an sdcard adapter in a tray off eBay. It identifies itself as "SINTECHI" brand. The full ID string is "SINTECHI HighSpeed SD to CF Adapter V1.0".
It uses a FC1307A controller, as do 99% of the adapters you will find on eBay, Amazon, or Aliexpress. They appear to be all the same regardless of the device ID string or whether they support regular or micro cards. There is some more info about them here: https://goughlui.com/2019/02/03/tested-generi … dapter-sd35vc0/
Initially I used the SD adapter in my Pentium III Windows 98 machine and everything was fine. It doesn't support LBA48 (limiting you to 137gb disks), it is hardwired to the master IDE position, and it has a tiny write buffer so writes are slow, but it's reliable. Note that this setup was using a FAT32 partition.
I then tried to use it in my XT with the XT-IDE. This is documented as working: https://forum.vcfed.org/index.php?threads/xti … 68/#post-896021. It's also documented as not working: Re: Using a vintage multi-track recorder as a mixer, namely the Roland VS-880EX - might apply to other Roland VS- units and SD Card to IDE Adaptor issues with FIC Slot 1 motherboard..
For the XT, I created a FAT16 partition. This seemed to work. It seemed to survive a soft reboot, and I formatted it and installed DOS. I then rebooted again (possibly a hard reboot), and all the partitions were gone. I tried FreeDOS, DOS 3.3, DOS 2.1, same problem.
[Edit: incorrect advice removed]
Initially I thought that if I made the first MBR partition a FAT32 or NTFS partition, I could make the others FAT16 and use them normally, but I cannot for the life of me make them bootable; see below.