I use the cheapest CF to IDE adapters from eBay. They all work fine 😀

For CF cards I have 2GB, 4GB, a 16GB and a 32GB. Various brands, all cheap stuff from eBay.

When you partition the drives with fdisk, after formatting do a FDISK/MBR otherwise many new CF cards will not boot.

I don't do anything else.

For my 486 FDISK created a single 500MB partition. FAT32 on the other hand can max out the capacity.

FDISK has a limit of around 64GB. Some DOS command utilities have issues with partitions larger than 32GB. So personal max is a 32GB CF card...

Mau1wurf1977 wrote:

I use the cheapest CF to IDE adapters from eBay. They all work fine :) […]
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I use the cheapest CF to IDE adapters from eBay. They all work fine 😀

For CF cards I have 2GB, 4GB, a 16GB and a 32GB. Various brands, all cheap stuff from eBay.

When you partition the drives with fdisk, after formatting do a FDISK/MBR otherwise many new CF cards will not boot.

I don't do anything else.

For my 486 FDISK created a single 500MB partition. FAT32 on the other hand can max out the capacity.

FDISK has a limit of around 64GB. Somey DOS command utilities have issues with partitions larger than 32GB. So personal max is a 32GB CF card...

I see, thanks! I remember reading somewhere about "aligning the block to 1024" or something, otherwise the CF won't be able to be partitioned.

Kreshna Aryaguna Nurzaman wrote:

... I remember reading somewhere about "aligning the block to 1024" or something, otherwise the CF won't be able to be partitioned.

You'll be able to partition, but on Windows XP the performance of SSDs & CFs will be degraded unless partitions are correctly aligned, see here.

(Vista and Se7en align partitions correctly automatically, no troubles there).

Personally for MS-DOS I'm happy to use CF cards. But for W95 or W98 I prefer using a SATA notebook drive connected to a PCI SATA adapter just like I demonstrate on my YT channel 😀 Works really well.

On Windows 2000 and above (not sure with Win95/98 as I haven't tested it), you won't be able to install the OS on a standard CF card as it will always be detected as a removable device. You'll need to get an industrial CF card to install Win 2K or better. Industrial CF cards are set to true IDE mode and are detected as a normal IDE drive. Some standard CF cards have a utility to set it to true IDE mode (Some Sandisk cards from what I've read) but you'll have to do some research as to which ones can be set to true IDE mode.

W95 and 98 works fine on CF cards 😀

Installed 2k fine on a seemingly "non-industrial" CF...

Mau1wurf1977 wrote:

I use the cheapest CF to IDE adapters from eBay. They all work fine 😀

I disagree with this statement. There are different chips in some of them that work better than others. I think you've just been lucky with your eBay purchases.

What chips? Most of them seem to be passive adapters...

Yah, I suppose I should have backed up that statement. Alas, I don't remember anymore as I sold that computer. Here is one such link that might help.
http://vampiric.us/index.php/articles/hardware/cf/cfadapters

Yes they are passive. There is nothing fancy about them 😀

What's the point of a CF to IDE adapter that doesn't work?

SD adapters are different, but IDE compatibility is part of the CF specifications.

I also have a few microdrives, they also work fine.

I have maybe 10 or 15 such adapters. Various models, shape, some dual, some go directly into the IDE port on the motherboard, some go into a ribbon cable. They are all cheap, just a few bucks and work.

The adapters are passive, but need to be wired correctly in order to use DMA transfer modes. Some of the cheap adapters are wired wrong.

http://www.fccps.cz/download/adv/frr/cf.html

orcish75 wrote:

On Windows 2000 and above (not sure with Win95/98 as I haven't tested it), you won't be able to install the OS on a standard CF card as it will always be detected as a removable device. You'll need to get an industrial CF card to install Win 2K or better. Industrial CF cards are set to true IDE mode and are detected as a normal IDE drive. Some standard CF cards have a utility to set it to true IDE mode (Some Sandisk cards from what I've read) but you'll have to do some research as to which ones can be set to true IDE mode.

I fool Windows XP to accept CF cards with Removable Media Bit (RMB) on by using the Hitachi filter driver trick.

Click here and search for "A filter driver for removing the RMB has been made by Hitachi for their Microdrives ..."

Installed 2k fine on a seemingly "non-industrial" CF...

Sorry, I stand corrected! XP and above 😦

Many interesting points being made, thanks. I'm particularly interested in this point:

orcish75 wrote:

On Windows 2000 and above (not sure with Win95/98 as I haven't tested it), you won't be able to install the OS on a standard CF card as it will always be detected as a removable device. You'll need to get an industrial CF card to install Win 2K or better. Industrial CF cards are set to true IDE mode and are detected as a normal IDE drive. Some standard CF cards have a utility to set it to true IDE mode (Some Sandisk cards from what I've read) but you'll have to do some research as to which ones can be set to true IDE mode.

So this is apparently the caveat. I have tried ebay, and found very few industrial CF cards, not to mention they're mostly small capacity.

However, I googled a while, and found that you can change a CF card's type bits from "removable" to "fixed", but it depends on manufacturer. For Sandisk, for instance, you need a utlility named atcfwchg.com or ndcfwchg.com.

Question is, will the said util work with newer, larger version of Sandisk CF? Let say, I buy 128 GB Sandisk CF for my old HP nx6125 laptop. Can I make the 128 GB CF fixed, so I can use it as boot disk?

Now my memory is fading, but I do remember using puppy linux to take a look at this flag for removable drive. I believe it also allowed changing it. But I don't remember details as all my CF cards and micro drives work fine.

The micro drives are very slow however.

Mau1wurf1977 wrote:

Now my memory is fading, but I do remember using puppy linux to take a look at this flag for removable drive. I believe it also allowed changing it. But I don't remember details as all my CF cards and micro drives work fine.

The micro drives are very slow however.

I see, thanks. So Linux works for any CF regardless of brand, am I correct?

Puppy is one of these live CDs. You boot from the CD and there was a utility to display these flags / bits. But it was years ago and the solution to my CF cards not booting was running FDISK/MBR. Had to do the same with pretty much every new CF card I got.

Mau1wurf1977 wrote:

Puppy is one of these live CDs. You boot from the CD and there was a utility to display these flags / bits. But it was years ago and the solution to my CF cards not booting was running FDISK/MBR. Had to do the same with pretty much every new CF card I got.

I see, so I guess FDISK/MBR also sets the byte to fixed as well as making it MBR, doesn't it?