Thinkpads Forum

Hello all,

I recently bought some 2GB WD SiliconDrive CF cards on ebay, hoping I can use them with the cheap CF-IDE adapters floating around, also on ebay. With some work, I can fdisk and format the drives, but I cannot boot from them. In fact, I also tried a Cisco 1GB CF card, and the same problem. I have a 512GB Cisco CF card that works just fine, and other cards lower than that work as well. I thought you could at least have a 2-3GB drive in these systems, as I remember having a 3.2GB IDE drive back in the 90s on a 750 (that I still have, but as a parts machine now).

I get the same problem whether I use the CF adapter inside the machine, or try booting via PCMCIA. I've seen various posts about removing pin 2 also, but that should just be a pin connected to ground.

I should also mention that when the system tries to boot with the SiliconDrive, it shows a semicolon (;), and if you press any key, it attempts to boot from the floppy drive and presents the same semicolon again. Booting from a floppy does show the files on the card, but it just won't boot. The afchwchg.com utility doesn't seem to work on this card.

I wouldn't expect capacity to be a problem. Pretty sure those systems use EIDE/LBA so shouldn't have the 528 MB limit. Even if they did, the usual symptom of that would just be not seeing the full capacity of the drive. That you can partition and format suggests it isn't a problem with capacity in hardware at least. I think some of these models even shipped with 800+ MB drives.

Could be some issue with the specific CF cards, the adapter, or the version of linux.
To test the capacity theory you could just try putting a large hard drive in. Might be issues with drives over 2GB or 8GB.
I'd also try installing some other OS, either different/newer version of linux or Windows/DOS to see if it's a software issue.

EDIT: Note references to linux were because when I see 'fdisk' in lower-case I think of linux rather than DOS. Would still be worth testing with linux though.

One possibility is that the BIOSes in the old Thinkpad and your PC use different CHS -> LBA translation algorithms.
Another possibility is a BIOS HDD size limit. In those days the go-to solution was Disk Manager's Dynamic Drive Overlay.

I have heard that a CF card has "fix mode" and "removable mode". In order to use as a hard disk, it has to be fix mode. Some CF card can switch mode using factory software.

For what it's worth, I can indeed boot with larger mechanical hard drives. 810MB and 2.1GB (or even up to 4GB) works fine. But for whatever reason, I cannot get anything larger than 512MB CF cards to boot. I've tried both the SiliconDrive and Cisco cards (actually, the 512MB cards that work are for Cisco routers, and some say SiliconDrive on the rear). I either get the I99xxxx error, or a blank screen with a cursor. Booting in the PCMCIA slot also doesn't work for the larger cards. I do remember being able to see data when booting from a floppy.

I'm thinking it has to do with LBA translation as well, but I have no way to actually verify that. Someone mentioned Linux - I'd like to get Linux running, but I think I'm relatively limited, given the largest capacity I can use is 512MB, which is about 488MB formatted.

Hello,

A 365XD can handle a HD of max 8Gb.
If you happen to have a larger drive, lets say a 10Gb one, it won't work.
Some HD's can be "manipulated" with low level software to report a lower capacity.
I've tweaked a 10Gb drive that way to report something below 8Gb and it now works fine in my 365XD.
The thing to watch out for when tweaking a drive is:

no. of heads
no. of sectors per track
no. of heads

the 365XD's BIOS has limits in the maximum it can detect and thus handle.
I don't remember the exact limits anymore but I bet the 365XD cannot handle more than 1023 heads, 255 sectors and/or 63 heads.

Secondly, what 'iwait' wrote is correct. CF cards can report themselves to the host controller as being removable or fixed.
You need to have a CF card that reports itself as being fixed otherwise booting from it won't work.

Third: there are CF to SSD adapters that won't work because they apparently do not implement the IDE interface correctly.

For more information, see: http://www.daniel-boehmer.de/thinkpad-cf/

Best regards,

emeu1

My 370c boots from an 8gb CF card in the pcmcia slot.
They card is formated as ext4 and was created with 'unetbootin' which installs syslinux as the boot manager.

I haven't tried a larger card.

1.2GB (85G8562) is the largest that came for sale in the caddy from IBM, but the older ThinkPads (i.e. 750) need a firmware update to recognize anything over 340MB. I had a 810MB from of a 755, but without the update my TP 750 though it was only 170MB once I blew away the partition definition.

On a side note, will the 760XD accept an 8.1 GB drive from a dead 770E (HDD model DYLA-28100)? (I know about the 8.4GB limit, or 1023 cylinders/255 heads/63 sectors, of old ThinkPads and computers in general)

In my experience, 760 drives (at least the smaller sized ones) also work in the 755 (I had a 760 series 810MB drive/caddy in my 755C for a while, with no issues)

Update: Unfortunately it hangs at the "106112 KB OK" screen but I still can get into the BIOS where said drive passes and gives "OK" on the status screen... might try updating/flashing the BIOS to the latest and see if there's any change

An update to my dilemma - apparently, older "legacy" OSes will not work with my ThinkPad drive replacements. After tinkering around last night, I was able to get a 4GB Microdrive plugged into a CF adapter to boot up using Windows 98 SE. I was able to do the same feat on Compact Flash cards over 1GB, that previously would not work under MS-DOS 6.22. I believe I had the same problem on NT4, so the next step is to try OS/2 Warp 4 and Linux.

It took a lot of work and researching on the interweb to figure out how to get Windows 3.11 to run, despite using DOS from Windows 98 SE (and yes, it does work).