OT? IDE flash drive in OLD pc.

By "us dist" you mean US distributor, or something else? Your post may mean something if it's the former.

IDE drives automatically remap themselves to match what the BIOS thinks they are, so you just need a combination of tracks, cylinders, etc., to match the size of the drive -- there's no need to actually match the drive.

I've had good luck using Mesa Engineering IDE to CompactFlash adapters in very old PCs.

American distributor.

I also should have mentioned that small is ok. The first one we tried was

On Thu, 20 Dec 2007 08:36:02 -0700, I said, "Pick a card, any card" and "Not Really Me" instead replied:

What flavor of PC is it? Is it an XT? 286? 386? 486? Pentium? Does it even have an IDE port? You've left a lot of questions before you can expect an answer.

-- Ray

To those familiar with ATA - who are the obvious addressees of the query - the question is clear enough. Apparently his PC works with CHS rather than LBA addressing.

I was about to suggest looking into the CF-cards, since they look like ATA drives, but I did not know if there were any doing CHS.

Apparently Jim Stewart has found some so the OP got what he needed, I guess.

Dimiter

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On Thu, 20 Dec 2007 11:20:37 -0800 (PST), I said, "Pick a card, any card" and Didi instead replied:

Where did you see any addressees? I must have missed that. When posting a technical question to a technical forum it is customary to give all the details required for a qualified answer.

You seem to forget that this newsgroup is searchable on Google Groups meaning that without the qualifying parameters I requested the thread is useless as far as newsgroup conventions goes. Unless, of course, all details are provided in the query.

Let's not forget about why newsgroups are here to begin with.

-- Ray

From the original post, it seemed pretty clear to me that he needed some sort of IDE/ATA flash drive that was hardware compatible with a spinning drive and could be addressed by CHS. If you didn't get that, I would think that proper nettiquite would be to just chill out and let the cavalry handle it.

On Thu, 20 Dec 2007 12:08:13 -0800, I said, "Pick a card, any card" and Jim Stewart instead replied:

Don't be so arrogant, mate. I knew what the question was but depending on the variety of motherboards out there, the answer will have been different. As I pointed out earlier, you and others here seem to be forgetting why USENET was started in the first place.

Remember, he had tried a so-called working device which didn't work. Duh! If a device that worked elsewhere didn't work, more details are needed to determine why. Offering a device that worked for you is pointless.

The cavalry is us. Not just you. Get over yourself and try to educate others here rather than demean.

-- Ray

Sizes < 504Mb definitely work with CHS, my first CF-using product was CHS-only.

Wow, seems I will always keep on underestimating legacy forces no matter how hard I try not to ... :-). Do you know why they did CHS? Perhaps I did not underestimate anything and it is just that the first cards came out a very long time ago when there used to be no LBA (or it was too young to be relied solely on)?

Dimiter

It's hard to speculate on the reasons. True-IDE mode is supposed to be indistinguishable from a real HDD, and any real HDD under 504Mb (and many larger) supports CHS. I wrote my first CF code in 1999, the product was still viable in 2004 when the company in question went out of business.

Jim,

Thanks for the response. We will give that a try.

Scott

It the risk of turning the flame back on, I didn't know all the answers at the time, but thought the information was adequate. I was actually asking for an employee that isn't an NG user.

The pc is actually a 386. It must have an IDE port, otherwise he wouldn't need an IDE hard disk replacment. In truth, this is a floppy replacement. The system is working as a fairly sophisticated home controller. The other option is buy a few spare floppy drives and a case of floppies while they are still available. The floppies have been wearing out on rare occasions. I suppose a real hard drive is also an option.

You could argue that it should be replaced, but why turn a working system into recycled junk or landfill? I would expect power supply mortality to be the biggest concern, but the system is old enough that the power supply (and fan) seems to have been made in the era when they were expected to last more than a year or two.

Jim's solution seems quite good. The Mesa adapters are in the $15 range and you can put any CF card in them.

Merry Christmas and thanks to all who posted.

Scott

On Fri, 21 Dec 2007 09:02:01 -0700, I said, "Pick a card, any card" and "Not Really Me" instead replied:

Thanks for clarifying. Sounds like the device wasn't exactly what you needed. No wonder it didn't work right. Does the BIOS support a floppy boot? Most do.

-- Ray

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You will have little luck replacing an FDD with a CF card or other ATA compatible device. FDDs on PCs go over a completely different interface, and the short answer to your query is that there is nothing you can buy and plug in which will make any flash card look like a floppy drive.

It can be made, of course - some of us here can design it for you :-).

Dimiter

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Because, once upon a time, disks came with H heads, which operated on C circular paths, and read from (or wrote to) S sectors per path. To operate the disk you sought the appropriate path, selected the appropriate head, let the system read the disk until it found the appropriate sector, and then read or wrote onto it. You also had to consider the modulation format used, and a few other things. All those operations were performed by an interface card (or other structure) that understood the particular disk. You really had a low-level format operation, which could set the bytes per sector value, and thus also the S value. If you had a bad chunk you could arrange to not use one of the heads, although that was rare.

Nowadays the whole schmeer is moved onto the disk mechanism, and the commands are much simpler. Set the LBA, and read/write, and go. But the basic mechanism is still there, except it is more complex. The S value may not be (probably isn't) constant. The idea is to get as much storage as possible onto one disk.

Plug the flash drive into another pc and find out the CHS numbers it assigns to the drive (by entering the bios setup, using some Norton tool, invoking fdisk or whatever else). Write them down and use them for the old pc, and you are set.

Mit freundlichen Grüßen

Frank-Christian Krügel

Chuck,

actually having written the firmware it takes to do that on floppy disks for two different systems I had designed (using the same FDC, the NEC uPD765) I know that. Back in 1986 or so it was far from trivial to make a 1 MHz 6809 (which was all i had access to...) read/write a HD disk (HD came actually later, but DD 8" drives wroked at the same speed).

I was wondering why CHS made it into CF cards. I know how it made it into the ATA standard, actually this has been their only addressing method at the begining .Baack then, in the early 90-s, I opted for SCSI rather than ATA, which stopped at 815 MB 2.5" drives and I had to do ATA as well, but then they all supported LBA and I did not have to bother about CHS.

Because of the above - and perhaps other things I know - I know the CF cards or whatever ATA compatible will be of no use to the OP, he needs a floppy drive replacement which has nothing to do with ATA. In fact, there may well be smoke if he connects it there (but I don't know that).

Dimiter

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While this was not what the poster needed, I'm pretty sure such a device is already on the market.

A primary application is older test equipment which wants to write data to floppy disks. Even if a floppy drive can be found in a modern office, the reliability is often quite poor (both because 3.5" reliability was never great once it went mass market, and because the drives and media are now quite old).

As a result, I believe you can get adapters which go in place of the floppy drive and take some form of modern flash memory - CF card or SD card most likely.