First post, by WhiteFalcon
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First, I have read tons of topics on CF2IDE here and it helped a lot, but still cannot get it to work.
My 486DX2 has only one IDE channel - used by a 250MB HDD and a CD-ROM (CD-RW to be precise). And I would like to have a CF in there too. After a lot of fiddling around, I managed to get my SB16 (CT2910) to "slum it" and allow a CD-ROM to be connected to it and it really works! Just needed to use SBIDE.SYS and change the driver to VIDE-CDD.
That cleared one IDE port, slave to the HDD, so I connected the bracketed version of CF2IDE with a 16GB CF card (dont have any other, but a 512MB is on its way to me). Of course the PC would not even boot.
In BIOS I tried ESDI at first and it found the card as a 10MB HDD, no fun. So I hunted around for the right cyl/head/track values and tried a lot of them. My Green BIOS seems to be one of those that accept 15 heads as the max and does not support LBA. Hence the max is around 500MB.
Now the drive is visible in FDISK, but whenever I create a partition (tried mostly Primary DOS, but also Extended DOS partitions), it assigns the drive a letter and after a forced reboot the partition is gone. So I tried other values in BIOS and managed to get it to survive a reboot with values making it around 250MB a few times. I guess I would be happy even with that at least, but again, no such luck.
I formatted the drive, its mapped as D: now (the CD-ROM is disconnected), and I can copy files over onto it. Its rather slow, which is still okay, but when I try to run any program from it, the PC immediatelly freezes. So I tried just copying a game to it and back to C: and then run the copy from C: - it freezes too. Which means, the CF is corrupting the data somehow.
No I am at a complete loss.. does that mean the CF is bad? I tried it in Windows 10 with a CF reader and it seems totally fine. Or is it too big and the 512Mb may work? Or can it be the wrong values in BIOS? Perhaps low power from the power supply?
I once installed the same CF2IDE with a 8GB card in my Pentium 75 and I remember it just worked - I connected it, used FDISK, formatted the card and it has worked ever since without a hitch.
This is the current settings that usually survive the reboot:
Olivetti M4 P75, 32MB RAM, 4GB HDD, 8GB CF, CD-ROM, SoundBlaster AWE 64, Gravis Ultrasound MAX, Roland SCC-1, Roland MT-32, Roland CM-64
Intel 486DX2/66Mhz, 16MB RAM, VGA Trident 512kB, 1.6GB HDD WD, CD-ROM, 256MB CF, SoundBlaster 16 Pro (CT2910)