I've been plugging it into a system that does have auto detect and then writing down the heads/sectors/etc for each SD(or CF) card.

probnot wrote:

I've been plugging it into a system that does have auto detect and then writing down the heads/sectors/etc for each SD(or CF) card.

yeah but how to decide the cylinder/head/sector numbers to write?

noshutdown wrote:

probnot wrote:

I've been plugging it into a system that does have auto detect and then writing down the heads/sectors/etc for each SD(or CF) card.

yeah but how to decide the cylinder/head/sector numbers to write?

If you can find an older system with auto detect (486/pentium era) it will list that info in the bios when you auto detect the drive. Unfortunately newer systems won't.

I added this little utility to my primary boot disk : WhatIDE by an older man named Kevin Parr
http://kevparr.com/misc/whatide.php

Just install the SD/CF disk in the system, and boot from a floppy with this utility on it.
Run the utility.
Note the reported information.
Reboot the PC and input the information in the BIOS.
Have fun.

Cool, thanks, I'm just downloading WhatIDE, as well. ^^
By the way, this thread reminds me of a slightly older thread (IDE disk-on-module + 386)..

^^ I never got around to following up in that thread, but I was able to get my CF-IDE working using IDEDIAG.EXE. I just booted from a floppy with all IDE channels set to "none" in the BIOS, ran IDEDIAG, jotted down the parameters it showed for my CF card, and used those. Problem solved, FreeDOS was happy with those settings once I formatted the drive and everything seems fine.

For the OP: Jo22 posted IDEDIAG in my original thread mentioned above. Grab it here and go to town.

On desktop PCs this works nicely. I - on the other hand - are most solely dealing with old notebooks where the BIOS is almost always severly limited and you are not able to change C/H/S settings or the like at all.

That is why I always tend to go back using Drive Overlay Software like EZ-Drive or On-Track which will take care of the C/H/S emulation, regardless of the CF- or SD-Cards used.

Hello jaZz_KCS! That's understandable, laptops are a bit finicky at times when it comes to fixed disks.

I tried myself to convince my Compaq Contura to use CF cards, but the auto-detection didn't like any of them.
In that case, an overlay software is sure an alternative that's worth a try! 😀

Personally, I try to avoid DDOs whenever possible, though. They are like hacks depending on how you look at them.
Also, they are a bit dangerous if the medium in question is supposed to be moved to another machine (I'm thinking of SD/CF cards).

DDOs work fine in DOS once loaded, but other OSes like Win95 or OS/2 try to read the partition/drive geometry directly.
If that happens, the data gets corrupted beyond repair. Sure, that's a non-issue if someone makes Win95 aware of the situation
(force int13h access/disable IDE driver or install a Win95 helper program for the DDO) or if the machine is for playing games only.

Jo22 wrote:

Hello jaZz_KCS! That's understandable, laptops are a bit finicky at times when it comes to fixed disks. […]
Show full quote

Hello jaZz_KCS! That's understandable, laptops are a bit finicky at times when it comes to fixed disks.

I tried myself to convince my Compaq Contura to use CF cards, but the auto-detection didn't like any of them.
In that case, an overlay software is sure an alternative that's worth a try! 😀

Personally, I try to avoid DDOs whenever possible, though. They are like hacks depending on how you look at them.
Also, they are a bit dangerous if the medium in question is supposed to be moved to another machine (I'm thinking of SD/CF cards).

DDOs work fine in DOS once loaded, but other OSes like Win95 or OS/2 try to read the partition/drive geometry directly.
If that happens, the data gets corrupted beyond repair. Sure, that's a non-issue if someone makes Win95 aware of the situation
(force int13h access/disable IDE driver or install a Win95 helper program for the DDO) or if the machine is for playing games only.

Finicky as in: Most laptops/notebooks having prorpietary BIOSes that do not let you change drive settings at all, yes! (Well the Compaq Contura series had drive settings in their custom BIOS setup utility, but I never got it to accept any changed vaules 😀 )

Please do elaborate on the "OSes like Win95 or OS/2 try to read the partition/drive geometry directly." and it resulting it in unrecoverable data. Becasue I have used many, many SD cards in IDE adapters as HDD substitutes in many many notebooks. And all these cards exceeded their bios barriers so EZ-Drive is almost always used on those machines (include a lot of Win98SE and Win95B machines as well). I have yet to come across garbage data produced by them. I thought that was one of the jobs of the Drive Overlay Software to make sure that when the OS wants to read the structure directly that they "translate" it for them, preventing damage?

Related to the Contura, which mode is it? Because I know I have 2 Contura's around here somewhere that do BOTH use CF/SD cards. And one of them runs W95 indeed. So I am very interested in these DDO flaws.

DDOs were heavily used at the time of Win95 without problems. I can't speak of other OSs though.

jaZz_KCS wrote:

Please do elaborate on the "OSes like Win95 or OS/2 try to read the partition/drive geometry directly."[..]

Uh, I'm not good at explaining things; I'm afraid. 😅 But I'll try: Windows 95 uses its own IDE protected-mode disk driver, esdi_506.pdr.
It is a cousin of the FastDisk component in Windows 3.11, albeit much more sophisticated.
Whenever an unsupported real-mode driver was in action or if the boot drive was not detected, Windows 95 would fall back
to MS-DOS Compatibility mode and use MS-DOS 7.

For Win95 (+NT,OS/2), there's an update, DMPATCH, for EZ-Drive overlays.
According to the readme file, it is a subset of the Disk Manager software.

"Read Me File for Disk Manager 6.03D Patch: DMPATCH.EXE

This patch is a subset of the Disk Manager 6.03D. To use it, run
'DMCFIG /U' at the DOS command line. It will then update the
Dynamic Drive Overlay and/or the DMDRVR.BIN and XBIOS.OVL files
to version 6.03D. In a Windows 95 environment it will also modify
the SYSTEM.INI file to remove WDCDRV.386 if it has been inadvertently
installed in this environment."

http://www.techadvice.com/support/w/wdc/wd_uti.htm
ftp://ftp.mpoli.fi/hardware/HDD/WDIGITAL/DMPATCH.ZIP
http://vintage-pc.tripod.com/hdd_utils.html

jaZz_KCS wrote:

I thought that was one of the jobs of the Drive Overlay Software to make sure that when the OS wants to
read the structure directly that they "translate" it for them, preventing damage.

Okay, perhaps I should have been more precise with that part.
What I wanted to express is that the DDO drives work fine once the DDO software is loaded in DOS (or any other OS for that matter).
However, depending on the type of the DDO, it *can* be risky to access DDO drives from other OSes,
if the DDO is not loaded there. For example, if the drive is taken out of a PC and connected to another
machine. In that situation, the OS tries to figure out drive geometry on its own (and might encounter a hidden DDO partition w/ CHS layout).
This may or may not work. If the LBA/E-CHS translation algorithm is different, any OS with a writing mania (Windows)
might damage existing data once the drive is connected. Well, in theory at least. It depends on the type of DDO also.
As I said, I try not to use DDOs if I have a chance to choose. 😅

jaZz_KCS wrote:

Related to the Contura, which mode is it? Because I know I have 2 Contura's around here somewhere that do BOTH use CF/SD cards.
And one of them runs W95 indeed. So I am very interested in these DDO flaws.

Hi, it's a Contura 400c, I think. I've got also the diagnostics/setup floppies. The problem is rather difficult to explain..
The laptop does detect the CF card, so the adapter is fine and in right position. But.. It would never boot from it.
Setting up a primary DOS partition in FDISK works, but it would never boot from it. I also tried FDISK /MBR and activated the partition,
but it didn't help. Other strange things also happened, as far as I remember: Partition wanished after boot-up,
FDISK on the DOS 6.2 floppy wouldn't find a hard drive, etc. When I put the original fixed disk drive back, everything worked fine again.
Strange, isn't it ? Perhaps there's a water vein under our house causing all sorts of weird stuff ? 😕

konc wrote:

DDOs were heavily used at the time of Win95 without problems. I can't speak of other OSs though.

That's right. People usually had just one bootable hard disk installed back then, which both Win95 and the DDO software were installed on.
And even if a secondary partition/disk existed, Windows 95 was probably already in charge and could use either DDO magic or its own
proctected-mode driver to handle it. Problems likely wouldn't occur before someone would start swapping physical disks.

Jo22 wrote:

For Win95 (+NT,OS/2), there's an update, DMPATCH, for EZ-Drive overlays. According to the readme file, it is a subset of the Dis […]
Show full quote

For Win95 (+NT,OS/2), there's an update, DMPATCH, for EZ-Drive overlays.
According to the readme file, it is a subset of the Disk Manager software.

"Read Me File for Disk Manager 6.03D Patch: DMPATCH.EXE

This patch is a subset of the Disk Manager 6.03D. To use it, run
'DMCFIG /U' at the DOS command line. It will then update the
Dynamic Drive Overlay and/or the DMDRVR.BIN and XBIOS.OVL files
to version 6.03D. In a Windows 95 environment it will also modify
the SYSTEM.INI file to remove WDCDRV.386 if it has been inadvertently
installed in this environment."

http://www.techadvice.com/support/w/wdc/wd_uti.htm
ftp://ftp.mpoli.fi/hardware/HDD/WDIGITAL/DMPATCH.ZIP
http://vintage-pc.tripod.com/hdd_utils.html

I looked into the readme file of your posted Patch, and it seems to be a patch for Ontrack Disk Manager overlays and not EZ-drive overlays. This would explain why I never ran into problems with Windows95 booting after DOS booted from an EZ-Drive 9.06+ drive/SD/CF-card, because I always use EZ-Drive instead of Ontrack. EZ-Drive seems to have this possibility checked already, although I could be mistaken, as I have not found any corresponding patch from/for EZ-Drive.

Regarding your 400C. I have the same model, Contura 400c. It came with a Quantum GoDrive with 210MB (which funnily enough still works with 0 bad sectors, although I could bet not for long.) I have successfully used both CF-cards (2 and 4GB) as well as SD-cards (2-8GB) with their respective adapters. But I have been using Drive Overlays due to a very specific reason..: Notebook BIOSes are always severely limited, of course. Mot of the times they do not give you ANY possibility to alter for example drive settings like cylinders, heads, etc... Things you can set on almost every desktop BIOS, due to the fact that when it comes to resource allocation, every laptop from every brand is (kind of) unique. Compaq actually DOES have (some) settings in the SETUP software, that appears to let you alter settings in the veins of c/h/s, etc.

But here's the thing..: Regardless of what I change, cylinders, HDD type, etc... I t never sticks. It always does revert back to what it thinks is the best value, or it doesnt accept my values for some reason.

This made me use SD- and CF-card adapters in the end, although I wanted to actually use a 256MB SD card that would totally still be in the BIOS limit, so I tried without Overlay Software first, but because of the stubbornness of the BIOS settings not letting me change them, I couldn't.

But if you have a CF-adapter with a CF card inserted that is well within the 504MB BIOS limit, it should work. The card first being acknowledged and working, but Partitions vanishing later at random sounds like drive parametres for the adapters changing automatically through boot-cycles. Which would suggest that the adapter/card may not even have "properly" been detected. For that reason (making sure that the parametres of your card stay the same each time you boot, regardless of what the BIOS says, I would encourage to try out a DDO and see whether it sticks then. Even if you are well within the BIOS limitation in terms of HDD size, it couldnt hurt, since it is not a real disk. As for simply not wanting to boot from the CF, this can actually happen and differs from CF card brand to another. Something that I have NOT experienced with SD cards, although I often use DDOs which help with booting.

In my experience, settings the parametres yourself correctly (even in desktop PCs where you can fully set everything manually) rarely worked and even more rarely worked reliably over time when using these adapters. Milage may vary, of course.

jaZz_KCS wrote:

Related to the Contura, which mode is it? Because I know I have 2 Contura's around here somewhere that do BOTH use CF/SD cards. […]
Show full quote

Related to the Contura, which mode is it? Because I know I have 2 Contura's around here somewhere that do BOTH use CF/SD cards.
And one of them runs W95 indeed. So I am very interested in these DDO flaws.
Hi, it's a Contura 400c, I think. I've got also the diagnostics/setup floppies. The problem is rather difficult to explain..
The laptop does detect the CF card, so the adapter is fine and in right position. But.. It would never boot from it.
Setting up a primary DOS partition in FDISK works, but it would never boot from it. I also tried FDISK /MBR and activated the partition,
but it didn't help. Other strange things also happened, as far as I remember: Partition wanished after boot-up,
FDISK on the DOS 6.2 floppy wouldn't find a hard drive, etc. When I put the original fixed disk drive back, everything worked fine again.
Strange, isn't it ? Perhaps there's a water vein under our house causing all sorts of weird stuff ? 😕

Just my two cents, it might the CF card itself. I have a dozen I bought as a batch on eBay, some work on certain systems, and some don't. Don't really know why. Try switching around some other cards.

oldpcguy wrote:

jaZz_KCS wrote:

Related to the Contura, which mode is it? Because I know I have 2 Contura's around here somewhere that do BOTH use CF/SD cards. […]
Show full quote

Related to the Contura, which mode is it? Because I know I have 2 Contura's around here somewhere that do BOTH use CF/SD cards.
And one of them runs W95 indeed. So I am very interested in these DDO flaws.
Hi, it's a Contura 400c, I think. I've got also the diagnostics/setup floppies. The problem is rather difficult to explain..
The laptop does detect the CF card, so the adapter is fine and in right position. But.. It would never boot from it.
Setting up a primary DOS partition in FDISK works, but it would never boot from it. I also tried FDISK /MBR and activated the partition,
but it didn't help. Other strange things also happened, as far as I remember: Partition wanished after boot-up,
FDISK on the DOS 6.2 floppy wouldn't find a hard drive, etc. When I put the original fixed disk drive back, everything worked fine again.
Strange, isn't it ? Perhaps there's a water vein under our house causing all sorts of weird stuff ? 😕

Just my two cents, it might the CF card itself. I have a dozen I bought as a batch on eBay, some work on certain systems, and some don't. Don't really know why. Try switching around some other cards.

Oh, yes, forgot that point. The chance of success varies greatly from CF card to CF card, whereas with SD cards I rarely found ones that weren't working. There are a few brands of CF that just simply won't work. HAs to do something with CF card adapters not translating per se since the CFs are PATA in protocol, whereas the SD card adapters have to emulate/translate so it doesnt really matter which ones you use, I guess.