I'm not sure I understand your problem. You can buy IDE adapters you can set to master or slave through a jumper:

Then you can just copy over the files you want or I guess you could try using clonezilla or something to 1:1 clone your hard drive on a CF or save a drive image. Then you can just use USBImager or Win32 Disk Imager to save an image you can write back on any CF of SD card whenever you want and have a bootable drive.

RandomStranger wrote on 2020-12-04, 07:54:

I'm not sure I understand your problem. You can buy IDE adapters you can set to master or slave through a jumper: https://cdn.sh […]
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I'm not sure I understand your problem. You can buy IDE adapters you can set to master or slave through a jumper:

Then you can just copy over the files you want or I guess you could try using clonezilla or something to 1:1 clone your hard drive on a CF or save a drive image. Then you can just use USBImager or Win32 Disk Imager to save an image you can write back on any CF of SD card whenever you want and have a bootable drive.

Not sure clonezilla runs on older hardware, maybe I was missing something but I couldnt even get the earliest version to load on my P166.

I ended up using Symantec Ghost via DOS boot disks to make image files of my IDE and IDE-SD card drives. I suppose this could be done any number of ways (e.g. linux dd) but for me being able to backup/restore over the network is very handy and Ghost is pretty easy to use.

I've got two simple adapters:

and a complicated adapter--

The simple ones are nice because:
1) 1/2 the price of one complicated one, so I can mod for UDMA and keep a control for testing UDMA 5 with DOM's & CF's
2) They don't have jumpers that hang out over the front, so they don't obstruct the space in front of the IDE pin block
But they do hang over the back of the IDE block a little bit

The complicated one is nice because:
1) It can run off IDE power if you have an ide adapter with v5 on pin 20
2) The PCB is centered over the ide pin block, so it doesn't hang over the back
3) it has das Blinkenlights!!
But the Slave/Master jumper has not been useful because these adapters usually sit on the base IDE pin block, so there's no way to attach a second device on the channel unless you have an IDE cable with a 40 pin female connector, and those are rare, and if you had one of those, you could probably mod it to do cable select pretty easily. http://unixwiz.net/techtips/ide-cable-select.html
I've never seen a CF card that would only work at 3.3v, so I've never needed to change that jumper
The jumpers hang out over the front. I recent put the complicated CF in the back pin block and tried to put a simple CF in the front, and the jumpers on the complicated adapter ripped off the UDMA mod wire from the simple CF adapter

I've seen pictures of "double" CF adapters that can take two CF cards, one as slave and the other as master. Those would take up even more space though and cost more than 2 simple adapters, so that's why I got the two simple adapters.

It would be nice if there was an adapter with a jumper to enable high speed UDMA.

drosse1meyer wrote on 2020-12-04, 14:30:

Not sure clonezilla runs on older hardware, maybe I was missing something but I couldnt even get the earliest version to load on my P166.

To be fair, I'm not sure if it does either. I prefer my retro builds with mobil rack mounted hard drives so if it's necessary I can just as easily move hard drives between older and newer PCs than CF cards with those drive bay mounted CF-IDE adaptors. Then anything that can boot from USB has no issues with clonezilla.

Buy some of these:

Print out something like this: https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:2454774
Then you have front swappable CF cards that you can boot from, along with a slave that can be your backup

My favorite CF cards have been the Dane-Elec CF cards, but the Lexar are nice too.