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IDE to SD adapter on old PC

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First post, by tranoidnoki

Posted on 
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Hey VOGONS!

I have an old compaq presario 4550 that i’ve been trying to load an IDE to SD card adapter into. I got the machine to detect it, but any kind of OS install just screws the pooch. Compaq Quickrestore disc hangs, windows 9x installer says that files cant be copied for whatever reason. I ended up setting the sd card up on my main pc, and just copying the entire hard drive over using Norton Ghost on the compaq. It worked well enough, but as soon as i tried using it it was a little slow, i walked away from it, and a bsod of “cannot read drive c” came up

Is this something I can get working on this machine? Would using 80 conductor vs 40 conductor ide cables fix the issue? Should i get an ide -> sata?

Any tips or tricks would be appreciated

Reply 1 of 2, by weedeewee

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There's plenty of threads about people struggling with those kinds of adapters.
I have also given such an adapter a try once, in a compaq m700, which shares the ide bus with the cd/dvdrom. and for some reason, it wouldn't cooperate nicely, always causing errors and pulling the bus to the slowest pio mode in windows. A speed which is intolerable. This was even without using the cd/dvdrom drive. Just having it present was enough to cause problems.

Best Tip or trick to give you, Try other brands/models of those adapters. I eventually went with a 2"5 msata to ide adapter, which gave no problem co-existing with the optical drive and was actually much faster than the sd adapter. I also tried other msata adapters, but they gave me similar problems.

in short... It's a crapshoot.

good luck.

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Reply 2 of 2, by Horun

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weedeewee wrote on 2021-08-26, 21:42:

Best Tip or trick to give you, Try other brands/models of those adapters. I eventually went with a 2"5 msata to ide adapter, which gave no problem co-existing with the optical drive and was actually much faster than the sd adapter. I also tried other msata adapters, but they gave me similar problems.

in short... It's a crapshoot.

good luck.

Excellent advice ! and there seems little reason why one works and others do not.....ok so diff motherboards, diff bios, diff controllers, etc too many variables ;p

Hate posting a reply and then have to edit it because it made no sense 😁 First computer was an IBM 3270 workstation with CGA monitor. Stuff: https://archive.org/details/@horun

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