CompactFlash card to IDE adaptor problem

whaleyboy · Post by **whaleyboy** » Fri May 22, 2020 5:21 am

Hello! I've bought a StarTech CFcard to IDE adapter for my Dell 486D/66 but cannot getting working correctly. I've got it set as a slave drive to my normal HD and it does detect the new drive but is incredibly (unusably) slow. The CF card is only 256MB so was hoping it would be fairly straightforward. Was wondering if anyone has managed to get this sort of thing setup on their DOS machine and what BIOS settings they used. Thanks!

Rwolf · Post by **Rwolf** » Fri May 22, 2020 7:00 am

I've had some problems with UDMA CF cards, where some otherwise good brands (e.g. Sandisk 32MB CF) did not function at all due to a design change that I was unaware of.

If this is the same case for you I cannot say, but you might look here:
http://support.fccps.cz/download/adv/frr/cf.html

whaleyboy · Post by **whaleyboy** » Fri May 22, 2020 1:44 pm

Thanks for the reply. Can I ask what CF card you found that worked?

Rwolf · Post by **Rwolf** » Sat May 23, 2020 2:34 pm

I don't recall, I had a mix of brands I was testing out, and other older SanDisk cards worked fine, I think it was the UDMA thing that the adaptor could not support, e.g. no DMA pins to pass through, the older cards did not have them and used PIO. It was the BIOS that detected the DMA capability and got stuck trying to use it. This new feature was not mentioned on the CF card itself, unless you looked at the manufacturer website specs you did not know it was there. Another adapter could probably also have worked, but mine was a custom thing I had to live with.