First post, by sineofsine
Hey all,
I just slapped together a 486 system and I'm getting intermittent write errors on the CF card. Here's what I'm working with:
- MSI MS4137 with AMI BIOS AB8193053
- AMD DX2 @ 100MHz w/heatsink
- 32MB RAM
- A: Real NEC 3.5" Floppy
- B: Gotek 3.5" Floppy
- MIO-400KF Rev F Acer Multi I/O Card (IDE, Floppy, Parallel, Serial)
- Syba IDE/PATA to CF Adapter
Here are the cards I've tried with no change in behavior:
- Transcend 512MB Industrial 200I
- Transcend 4 GB 133X CompactFlash Memory Card TS4GCF133
- Transcend 2 GB 133X CompactFlash Memory Card TS2GCF133
- Verbatim 2GB 47012
Symptoms:
- Installing files during DOS 6.22 installer will randomly fail, second retry always works for me ("An error occurred while reading or writing to drive C")
- Windows 3.11 installer fails at some point during the second disk ("Problem with disk drive C; Please check to see that the disk is properly inserted in the drive and that the drive door is closed.") Continuing from here almost always corrupts the drive (messed up blocks, garbage filenames, etc.)
- Opening certain applications in Windows 3.11, I see a write error, I assume writing temp files. This can cause the system to destabilize.
- With some cards or configurations, even `dir` can fail a lot of the time.
- The majority of IO failures are write; read fails much less frequently
Screenshots and hardware shots: https://imgur.com/a/3c9V22F
In combination, I've also tried:
- Using 500MB, 1GB, or 2GB partitions on cards that can fit
- Using only the Gotek or NEC drive.
- Installing from either drive exhibits the exact same symptoms.
Notes:
- The BIOS doesn't seem to be having trouble detecting the layout of any of the cards I've used
- If I install/copy DOS and/or Windows with DOSBox or a host machine, things seem to boot and work fairly well, especially in DOS
- That the floppies are copying files to C: seems to guarantee an eventual write failure, which is suspicious to me. Otherwise, errors are less frequent, but still annoying. Windows is not super forgiving for IO errors.
- I'm going to try some different IO card setups. Any recommendations?
I'm curious to know:
Is this IO card destined for the trash? It was a random pickup.
Does anyone know of an absolutely rock-solid setup for CF cards? I feel like I've chosen some pretty good candidates...
Any known problems that have to be taken care of with manual configuration?
Any other ideas? Happy to try some things out while I wait for some other IO cards to arrive.
Cheers,
sin(sin)