Quick check- Do you have the master slave jumper set correctly on your CF adapter? Is the #1 pin of the cf adapter lined up with the #1 pin on your IDE card?

I have had some difficulties with CF adaptors that look like the one you have there, female socket, minimal components on board, no voltage selection. Any chance you have another 40 pin cf adapter?

Why is they CF set as slave? Because of some quirk of this specific PC or is it arbitrary? I'm asking because not all adapters and cards behave well as slave. Especially when, if I understood correctly, there is no master present.

konc wrote on Yesterday, 12:48:

Why is they CF set as slave? Because of some quirk of this specific PC or is it arbitrary? I'm asking because not all adapters and cards behave well as slave. Especially when, if I understood correctly, there is no master present.

It does the same thing set to master. I will try another CF card adapter once it arrives in the mail. I don't have any good hard drives to try with it at the moment. Ones I've plugged in that did show some life produced garbled characters when detected and then the screen froze as usual.

douglar wrote on Yesterday, 12:31:

Quick check- Do you have the master slave jumper set correctly on your CF adapter? Is the #1 pin of the cf adapter lined up with the #1 pin on your IDE card?

I have had some difficulties with CF adaptors that look like the one you have there, female socket, minimal components on board, no voltage selection. Any chance you have another 40 pin cf adapter?

I would have to borrow a HDD out of one of my sub 1gb systems if I'm desperate to get answers...but I think you're right - I can't personally be sure it is plugged the correct way round or vouch for the quality of the CF adapter. I don't want to rip apart other computers for the sake of this one, so I will wait on a new CF adapter and CF card plus 5.25 dos boot disk.

Ok, the activity light stays on until the CF card channel is detected (and HDD light on the IDE card). Think this may be a boot sector issue with the CF possibly. Will report back.

JShone2025 wrote on Yesterday, 15:27:

konc wrote on Yesterday, 12:48:

Why is they CF set as slave? Because of some quirk of this specific PC or is it arbitrary? I'm asking because not all adapters and cards behave well as slave. Especially when, if I understood correctly, there is no master present.

It does the same thing set to master. I will try another CF card adapter once it arrives in the mail. I don't have any good hard drives to try with it at the moment. Ones I've plugged in that did show some life produced garbled characters when detected and then the screen froze as usual.

First run the cf as a master. Too many CF’s out there don’t like being slave. Get that out of the way.

Next, the garbled characters in the device name usually indicate an electical signal problem of some sort. Data is not transmitted reliably between the cpu and the cf. If you Bios has an isa speed divisor, make sure it is set so that your bus is running <9Mhz. Then clean the edge connector & ide pins on the IDE card. A swab with isopropyl alcohol or a pencil eraser usually work well for this. You could also try a different isa slot or try inserting and removing the card a couple times if the slots look dusty or dirty. Or maybe there’s some other card in the system that’s misbehaving and talking on the bus when the ide controller tries to talk.

But my money is that the CF adapter is defective. I bought a pair that looked like that this fall and neither worked reliably. My adapters worked well enough to detect the devices and booting Dos, but if I tried to install win95, things would fail during the install or the files system would become corrupted shortly afterwards on the times that the OS installed successfully. I was doing UDMA speeds though.

douglar wrote on Today, 00:46:

First run the cf as a master. Too many CF’s out there don’t like being slave. Get that out of the way. […]
Show full quote

JShone2025 wrote on Yesterday, 15:27:

konc wrote on Yesterday, 12:48:

Why is they CF set as slave? Because of some quirk of this specific PC or is it arbitrary? I'm asking because not all adapters and cards behave well as slave. Especially when, if I understood correctly, there is no master present.

It does the same thing set to master. I will try another CF card adapter once it arrives in the mail. I don't have any good hard drives to try with it at the moment. Ones I've plugged in that did show some life produced garbled characters when detected and then the screen froze as usual.

First run the cf as a master. Too many CF’s out there don’t like being slave. Get that out of the way.

Next, the garbled characters in the device name usually indicate an electical signal problem of some sort. Data is not transmitted reliably between the cpu and the cf. If you Bios has an isa speed divisor, make sure it is set so that your bus is running <9Mhz. Then clean the edge connector & ide pins on the IDE card. A swab with isopropyl alcohol or a pencil eraser usually work well for this. You could also try a different isa slot or try inserting and removing the card a couple times if the slots look dusty or dirty. Or maybe there’s some other card in the system that’s misbehaving and talking on the bus when the ide controller tries to talk.

But my money is that the CF adapter is defective. I bought a pair that looked like that this fall and neither worked reliably. My adapters worked well enough to detect the devices and booting Dos, but if I tried to install win95, things would fail during the install or the files system would become corrupted shortly afterwards on the times that the OS installed successfully. I was doing UDMA speeds though.

Thanks. I've messed around enough. I've ordered an SD to IDE adapter for good measure and also a Glitchworks XTIDE. Let you know how it goes!

An SD to IDE adapter is going to be worse; they are just SD to CF adapters wired to an IDE connecter.

jmarsh wrote on Today, 16:45:

An SD to IDE adapter is going to be worse; they are just SD to CF adapters wired to an IDE connecter.

Not sure what you are getting at there. Pata is pata, regardless of whether it is on 40 pins, 44 pins or 50 pins like a CF.

The sintechi SD to Pata bridges have some incompatibilities, but I don’t think they will figure into this build.

A CF to 40 pin device is an adapter because it just reroutes wires. SD to Pata is a bridge because it has to translate protocols. That’s more complicated, but there is only one family of chips & and few firmware versions used in these devices so they are a little more predictable that cf devices that have dozens and dozens of flash controllers and even more firmware versions.

douglar wrote on Today, 16:48:

The sintechi SD to Pata bridges have some incompatibilities, but I don’t think they will figure into this build.

A CF to 40 pin device is an adapter because it just reroutes wires. SD to Pata is a bridge because it has to translate protocols. That’s more complicated, but there is only one family of chips & and few firmware versions used in these devices so they are a little more predictable that cf devices that have dozens and dozens of flash controllers and even more firmware versions.

And they're rubbish. They have a lot more incompatibilities than regular CF cards running in IDE mode. They can't even get the C/H/S translation right unless the card has a FAT primary partition already present to take values from.

(Not to mention the speed of them is also absolute garbage compared to regular CF cards.)

jmarsh wrote on Today, 18:39:

douglar wrote on Today, 16:48:

The sintechi SD to Pata bridges have some incompatibilities, but I don’t think they will figure into this build.

A CF to 40 pin device is an adapter because it just reroutes wires. SD to Pata is a bridge because it has to translate protocols. That’s more complicated, but there is only one family of chips & and few firmware versions used in these devices so they are a little more predictable that cf devices that have dozens and dozens of flash controllers and even more firmware versions.

And they're rubbish. They have a lot more incompatibilities than regular CF cards running in IDE mode. They can't even get the C/H/S translation right unless the card has a FAT primary partition already present to take values from.

(Not to mention the speed of them is also absolute garbage compared to regular CF cards.)

You seem to have some strong opinions here.

My benchmarking shows that when paired with a non crap SD card, a SD bridge will perform similarly to the fastest CF devices on controllers up to ATA 33. When you get to ATA 66 and better , the top performing CF devices start to pull ahead, but the top performing group of CF devices is a pretty small subset of CFs.

But these are just generalizations. On older controllers, there are a lot of variables that come into play when looking at storage performance, so a storage device that performs well on one system might appear slow on another, even when every is just doing PIO.

While sintechi SD bridges have quirks and issues, one SD sintechi bridge is pretty much like all the others so they all have the same quirks and issues. They have some predictability.

CF devices on the other hand were under active development by many vendors for many years, so predicting what quirks your device might have can be more challenging and the performance & compatibility varies a lot from a y2k silicon drive to a 2015 industrial ultra to a 2008 card design optimized for cam border storage.

Re: List of VLB IDE Controllers