8-bit WD IDE adapter + CF?

[Jim Leonard]

Doc Shipley wrote:
> 
>   A few days ago someone mentioned that a CF-IDE adapter worked with an 
> 8-bit controller.  I think.  Something about compact flash and 8-bit 
> anyway.

It was me.  I'm using a Silicon Valley Computer ADP50 with a Maxtor 
340MB drive as master and a CF-IDE adapter with 340MB CF IBM microdrive 
as the slave.  This is on an IBM PC/XT (5160).  Both the Maxtor and the 
CF push the maximum PIO over the bus, about 300KB/sec streaming reads.

Some notes:

- If anyone can find sources for ADP50s, please share.  I only have one 
and I most definitely want at least one more.  I am willing to trade 
hardware or a modest amount of buckazoids.

- I could not get it to recognize all the geometry on a 504MB drive, 
which was surprising because I could've sworn such drives are under the 
1024c 16h 64spt limit.  It's possible one of those soft-BIOS tools 
(Ontrack? EZDrive?) might work, but I couldn't find a version that 
didn't require a 386 to run so I just went with the 340MB drive I had 
lying around.  (I'm sure the actual code in the boot sector doesn't need 
a 386, just the install program.  Had I not been lazier, I probably 
could have prepped the drive in another PC.)

- Speed freaks: If you have a SCSI controller, such as Future Domain, 
you can go faster because the controller is memory-mapped.  I believe 
Michael Brutman has clocked speeds of 500KB/s with his setup (on a PCjr, 
no less!)

- Even with recognizing the full geometry of the drive, partitioning was 
non-trivial.  The working setup right now is PC DOS 2K (IBM PC DOS 7.0 
with Y2K fixes) and I believe I partitioned it with Ranish Partition 
Manager v. 2.37.11 (last version to run on 808x).  The second drive, not 
needing a bootable primary partition, was much easier; native PC DOS 2K 
FDISK set the entire thing up as an extended partition + logical drive 
that covered the entire thing.  MSDOS 6.22 works too.
-- 
Jim Leonard (trixter at oldskool.org)            http://www.oldskool.org/
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