I bought some SD cards and adapters recently to use in retro systems. Have yet to try using them, but thank you for warning me. That should save me lots of wasted time 😀

I use a Sintechi chip based SD to IDE thing and it works great with at least 2 and 4GB size cards I have given it. Has worked with 386, 486, Pentiums and Pentium IIIs.
http://www.tmeeco.eu/BitShit/PCschit/SintechiSDtoIDE.jpg

I use the same Sintechi adapter as Tiido in my 486 (and anything which doesn't write a lot) and it works for me without a hitch in most cases. I have tested with up to 32 GB Sd cards btw. The only systems where these dont work are my 486 Thinkpads but those are quite picky anyway.

Most cards come preformatted without partition table. That's not a problem for Windows/Linux, but the BIOS expect to find a MBR with a valid partition. Also, fdisk expects to find a partition table, so it is interpreting invalid data (the boot sector from your FAT file system) as a corrupt partition.

So, connect your SD card to a Windows PC and use Rufus to format it. Rufus will create a valid MBR with a valid partition table. Also, it can put FreeDOS (normally only the boot files, but can install the entire system if you have a FreeDOS iso on your computer) on your card so you can boot your computer inmediatly . Keep in mind that the HDD mode can prevent booting, so you many need to switch between CHS, Large and LBA.

Even if you choose to not install FreeDOS at that time, Rufus will let your card ready to be fdisk'ed and formatted with your DOS floppies.

About cloning the card: any tool like Norton Ghost, Acronis True Image or Clonezilla will make a good copy.

Another option for cloning it is to create a virtual hard disk (in Windows) by going to Disk Management > Action > Create VHD. Tell it where you want to store the file on your computer. Make it roughly the size of your SD card. Once it is mounted, you can use something like Minitool Partition Wizard to clone the working SD card to the empty virtual drive using the "Disk Copy Wizard" to ensure a full copy. Now, you've got a copy of your SD card with the added benefit of being able to add files to it from your main PC simply by mounting the .VHD. When its mounted, you can simply use the Disk Copy Wizard again to clone the virtual drive to another SD card or even a hard drive (for systems that just won't work with SD cards).

You can unmount a VHD through disk management, and you can mount one in read\write mode by simply double clicking the file. You can also mount it as read-only using Disk Management > Action > Attach VHD if you want to be 100% sure no changes are saved to the original working .VHD when it is unmounted.

thanks for the tips

the notebook is going to be way retro, with DOS and Windows 3.11 only.

i tried taking the SD out and connect it to win10, (because i wanted to transfer some games and files to it) but win10 did not recognize the SD because it is FAT16 i belive.

so any tips are very handy if you want to transfer files to that SD card to avoid using floppy disks.

Pabloz wrote:

So any tips are very handy if you want to transfer files to that SD card to avoid using floppy disks.

a) Always partition and format your flash medium in the old computer first. Also make it bootable on this machine.
Later on, you can put it in your modern machine to transfer files.
b) Normal SD cards and MMC cards are 2GB in capacity and below. Larger ones are SDHC or SDXC,
hich can't be used in older card readers, flash carts or digital cameras.

Good luck! I'll go back to bed now. （ー__ 一）

but this card is 2GB
it was formated as FAT16 by DOS6.22

but when i took it out and inserted into a card reader, win10 didnt even show it.

Tiido wrote:

http://www.tmeeco.eu/BitShit/PCschit/SintechiSDtoIDE.jpg

I'm using this adapter on a PIII with a 128GB SDXC card - also working great after removing the factory partition and performing the "FDISK /mbr" thing. I was actually having some problems with it initially, but after shortening the IDE cable it's been a breeze ever since.