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First post, by vetz

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I've installed a Silicon Image 3512 in my Compaq Presario. It recognizes the S-ATA drive in Windows and DOS. So far, so good. The Compaq does not have an option in the BIOS to change boot order. It is locked on floppy, CD-ROM and C: (IDE) in that order. It won't boot from any SCSI or IDE controller board.

Disconnecting the IDE drive makes an error called "DISK CONTROLLER ERROR" appear, refusing any booting from floppy or CD-ROM. The computer apparently requires a IDE drive to be connected before it can boot. So I was planning on maybe buying a IDE to SD card adapter to use as a boot device and then load Windows from the S-ATA drive. In the past I tried a IDE to CF card adapter and that didn't work. I've since read that some adapters isn't properly recognized as a harddrive on old computers making them non-bootable. I don't have a CF card laying around, but I do have SD cards.

This is the SD card adapter I've been looking at:
http://www.ebay.com/itm/Secure-Digital-SD-SDH … =item335fb206f1

There is also the possibility to use an IDE to S-ATA adapter (like the one Maur1wulf1977 tested), but the one I got never worked properly. I would also think that proper drive recognizing, size problems (8gb is the limit on the built-in IDE controller), and performance would be a hinder going that route. I would like to stick with the S-ATA controller card.

Last edited by vetz on 2013-02-04, 15:42. Edited 1 time in total.

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Reply 1 of 20, by shamino

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The issues people have with booting from CF is normally because of the formatting of the card, not the adapter. I think there's a "fixed disk" mode flag that needs to be set, and many don't come from the manufacturer in that configuration.

If you ever turn up a CF that you can mess with, try hooking it to a USB card reader, and then format it with the "HP drive key boot utility" or maybe the "hp usb disk storage format tool" (maybe both work, I'm not clear on the difference). These utilities are able to make "USB" flash drives bootable. By using it on a card reader, I've read that it will do the same to a CF card. I can't remember if I've actually tried this though.

Where possible, I prefer CF for this kind of thing since it's based on IDE so the adapters are much more natural. No "bridge" circuitry is even required. My understanding is that SD adapters have performance issues, and since they require active conversion I wouldn't trust their overall integrity as much.
But these things wouldn't matter with the way you're using it. SD might be the easiest solution in this case, if the booting works. I've never used an SD adapter so I can't say what issues are involved with making them boot.

Reply 2 of 20, by vetz

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Buying CF adapter with a 2GB card is the same price as the SD adapter, so I might as well go that route. If anyone have more experience with them ofc?

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Reply 3 of 20, by gerwin

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I have a similar SD to IDE adapter and it works fine as the only storage device on a DOS/Windows98 machine. Making it boot was not difficult. It is the same as making bootable USB sticks.

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Reply 4 of 20, by vetz

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gerwin wrote:

It is the same as making bootable USB sticks.

USB boot is not possible on this Compaq. The CF/SD adapter WILL have to be recognized as a proper IDE drive. I am asking since someone in another thread said something about some CF/SD adapters not being "true IDE" types. Do anyone have an adapter they can recommend that does work as an IDE bootable device on old 386/486 early pentium without having issues? Preferably on systems with BIOS that can't change boot order.

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Reply 5 of 20, by bestemor

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I've tested microdrives with a CF IDE adapter.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microdrive

Reason: they are just tiny harddrives, no special flash drive formatting needed.

(although the partitioning and formatting really had me going in circles for a while - no idea as why it was so difficult - still not sure what seemingly fixed it. But using anything else than pure DOS commands/boot disk for the job seems to fcuk things up - ie having to avoid any use of PartitionMagic in winXP or win98 or even XP's 'DiskManager')

Currently boots DOS 6.22 off C:\, having 2 more partitions (now with correct sizes!). Is seen as a normal hdd.
Only tested on a slot1 BX board so far, but no(?) reason it should behave differently elsewhere(286/386) ?

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Reply 6 of 20, by gerwin

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vetz wrote:

USB boot is not possible on this Compaq.

The 440bx board I use does not support USB boot either, I was only saying the procedure for preparing the SD card for booting was the same.

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Reply 7 of 20, by shamino

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The oldest system I've booted Flash with was a socket-7 Intel/Gateway 430VX board. It's old enough that it knows nothing about flash drives, and it just worked.
As noted earlier though, that was with CF but I imagine it would be similar with an SD adapter. Probably not much difference between doing this on the 440BX as gerwin did or a 430VX - either one is too old to be conscious of flash drives.

That socket-7 machine was still EIDE though - for a very old legacy specification IDE controller (the type with a 540MB limit) maybe there could be other issues. I've never tried legacy IDE with this.

Reply 9 of 20, by vetz

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gerwin wrote:

(Hey I passed over a 1000 posts on vogons! where can I find the special achievements and unlocked content? 😉 )

The cake is a lie

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Reply 11 of 20, by subhuman@xgtx

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gerwin wrote:
vetz wrote:

USB boot is not possible on this Compaq.

The 440bx board I use does not support USB boot either, I was only saying the procedure for preparing the SD card for booting was the same.

Download Plop boot manager, burn it to a cd and check if its Boot over USB functionality works 😀

Reply 12 of 20, by nforce4max

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It won't hurt to try as CF is still IDE in protocol instead of most most flash based drives, the problem can arise when the board is unable to recognize the CF card and formatting is no issue even on old macs. Give it a try and if the board can recognize then you are half way there.

On a far away planet reading your posts in the year 10,191.

Reply 13 of 20, by vetz

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I bought the CF card with a 2 GB card. Didn't cost me more than 8 dollars including shipping so I'll live if it fails 😀

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Reply 14 of 20, by KT7AGuy

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What are the advantages of using a CF card instead of a regular IDE hard drive? Isn't wear leveling an issue with operating systems earlier than Vista? Wouldn't the CF card wear out pretty quick under these conditions?

If you look around, you can easily find plenty of NOS and system-pulls of IDE HDDs. Used drives can also be found for dirt cheap.

Aside from concerns of mechanical failure, I suppose I don't see an advantage to using CF instead of a regular old HDD. Can anybody enlighten me?

Reply 15 of 20, by swaaye

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CF is silent, small, and has no access time. On the other hand they usually have dire small-write performance, wear problems, and sometimes don't behave nicely with the IDE interface on old boards. The small write issue can cause annoying stuttering/pauses.

Reply 16 of 20, by d1stortion

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My CF card completely refused to work with the UDMA/100 controller on my board. I still don't really know why, but then I figured out that it's way slower even than the normal UDMA/33, being a 133x card. 😁

As far as wear goes, I loaded my machine up with the maximum 512 megs and disabled the swap file. Most applications are ok with this, the only one that refused to run with it disabled was Quake II so far.

Reply 17 of 20, by vetz

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I will only be using it to boot the machine. I will load Windows and my games from an S-ATA drive connected to my S-ATA PCI card.

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Reply 18 of 20, by Logistics

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IIRC, its important to use utilities like MBRWizard to properly align the media to avoid stuttering, and actually set the drive as a bootable media/primary partition.

Reply 19 of 20, by swaaye

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Alignment helps a little but it will not come close to eliminating the problem. The only way to sort of solve it is a big write behind cache that can take advantage of idle time to do the actual writes. Don't lose power though!