Maybe its not that compatable overall.... perhaps you could try the adapter that uses compact flash cards.

Example - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VWfTgga7rmA

Bige4u wrote:

Maybe its not that compatable overall.... perhaps you could try the adapter that uses compact flash cards.

Example - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VWfTgga7rmA

That might be the case, when I get a chance to pull it out I'll try it in my modern desktop as it's still got a single IDE controller on board, hopefully it should at least let me know if it's the adapter or an incompatability issue. The compact flash adapters should work perfectly as they're based on IDE. If I didn't have a bunch of reasonable sized SD cards I would have probably gone that route first time round. 😀

I had similar problem. Don't use fdisk, use this solution:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ievfLSUXu2s
In my case, problem was with inability of fdisk to create MBR on SD card.

That's not going to help if there is data corruption occurring, as shown by the filename inconsistencies.
Try it on a different machine, if the same thing happens throw it in the bin. SD2IDE and SD2SATA adapters always seem to be poor quality unless you spend big bucks.

I did create the MBR on the SD cards, although that was using fdisk again. In one of my attempts I tried installing Windows 2000 and using it's partitioning tool with no joy.

I'm going to put my money on it being a duff adapter, typically I'm unlikely to find the time to try it on another desktop until after the summer holidays are over, although I may get time to put it in a USB to IDE caddy between now and then.

I can't see you mention whether you have another device on the same IDE cable because that will cause all sorts of weird problems.

Also: you can just try it in another PC with IDE if you have one? I've bought 3 types of SD adapters and 3 types of CF adapters to figure out which worked best (they're cheap on Aliexpress anyway) and some worked fine in one PC and absolutely did not work in another.

Most of my tests were with the SD-IDE being the only device on that IDE channel (either in the primary master or primary slave position), when I tested in on the secondary channel it was on the same channel as a DVD-ROM drive.

The adapter doesn't have any jumpers on it for setting CS/master/slave so I imagine it's probably not going to be happy with other devices alongside it unless you can work out what it's permenantly set to.

It works for me as primary master at the end of the cable with cd-rom jumpered as primary slave in the middle of the cable. And yeah, it's a bit picky.

Wolfus wrote:

It works for me as primary master at the end of the cable with cd-rom jumpered as primary slave in the middle of the cable. And yeah, it's a bit picky.

I couldn't get any of my CF adapters to work like that, even those with jumpers.

The first SD adaptor I tried didn't work either but then I found one with a 44 pin port (the kind used in laptops that are both power and data in one) and that one worked fine:
https://www.aliexpress.com/item/32845394344.html

You need something like this though to hook it up:
https://www.aliexpress.com/item/32950263775.html

Here's the one that didn't work:
https://www.aliexpress.com/item/32886988607.html

Hopefully this will be of use to someone since it's a lot of trial and error to see which are more compatible.

My IDE-SD looks exactly like your third link. It works, but only as single drive on the cable or as a master on the end of the cable. I also tried 3 different cards (2GB, 2GB, 4GB) and all of them had to be prepared in DISKPART just as in the video I linked. Without it they didn't boot. Everything works perfectly now (FAT32, DOS7 from W98 boot diskette).

The most reliable SD card in an IDE slot I have found is via an ide/cf adapter that plugs into the ide slot with no cable, then a cf/sd adapter which are mature devices from the camera industry.

I have a dozen of these adapters in use, and I can say that I never encountered a dead-on-arrival one, but according to others there ARE some. If problems like this arise and you have a spare adapter, try that one out first to eliminate the possibility of a dudd.

Other than that, yes, due to the fact they are jumperless and they want to be Master all the time for bugless operation, you will have to make sure that another possible device on the same IDE chain is set to slave. There was only one time where I had encountered the same behaviour (garbled text and sometimes broken filesystem.) The card was used as a the only device on the IDE chain (laptop), but the laptop's own IDE adapter was oh so slightly loose, which resulted in this problem.... sometimes....

Wolfus wrote:

I had similar problem. Don't use fdisk, use this solution:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ievfLSUXu2s
In my case, problem was with inability of fdisk to create MBR on SD card.

I have never had any problem using fdisk to create MBR on said SD2IDE adapters (Sintechi v1.0)

I also have a half dozen of these very same SD to IDE adapters and have had very good experience with them. The only problem I've encountered with any of them was when (optimistically) trying to partition a 128 GB micro-SD card (with another adapter to make it full sized SD) on a motherboard that likely didn't even support disk sizes above 80 GB.

I've also had good results with using them along with an optical drive or even another hard drive on the same IDE channel, as long as the other drive is specifically configured as slave. I do always use the adapter on the end of the IDE cable, but I'm not sure if that plays a role since I don't think I've ever even tried to connect it in the middle to test. And never had any problems with writing the MBR with fdisk. My normal procedure to use a new SD card with them is to first delete the existing partition in windows, then use fdisk to create a new partition, run fdisk /mbr and finally format /s the partition. Hasn't failed me yet with any of these adapters.