CF hard drive with lo-tech CF-IDE adapter in Compaq Luggable

I had decided that the slow, noisy, slowly-failing Plus! HardCard-20 in the Compaq needed to be retired a while ago, along with the fact that 21Mb of storage is a little on the slim side these days, especially for a machine that has FTP capability to be able to move data really quickly from A to B.

I bought a Compact Flash (CF) to IDE adapter on Amazon for a few bucks and gave it a try in my 386 a while back. The results were good, certainly as good as a modern hard disk (The 386 has a new 40Gb drive partitioned down to 538Mb, the largest the BIOS can handle) so I decided that it should be a good challenge to get it going in the 8088.



Collected everything together. That's an 8Gb CF card, because that was the cheapest I could get.

With my newly upgraded RAM, this should be a mean machine!



Not before looking at some of the components. Tiny, fiddly little things. Picked up with a pair of AA tweezers.



Managed to get that soldered onto the board.



Got the rest all built up. Top:



...and bottom (ignore the regular components, I missed ordering a couple, so we have through-hole stuff stuck on the board like an elephant balanced on a barrel):



Used my WinXP machine and GParted to slice the drive up. I wasted a little space on the CF to make a 512Mb drive up front as the primary, bootable partition so it's not so slow to read the free space, then 3 2Gb partitions behind it. I might have a play with extended partitioning and see how it handles it.



Woo!

It's also so faaaaast. With the V20 in, changing from the 8088 to the 186 code on the EEPROM makes a noticeable difference.

--Phil

After having checked clearances, desoldered one of the sockets and pulled the plastic off the other to mate the two boards into one piece. It's not much taller than a standard ISA card now! The CF is fairly easy to get to also. No clutter of ribbon cable inside the chassis either.



Rerun tonight to see how it goes.

--Phil

Successful change, though the CF board lied when it said that it would accept +5v on the locate pin.



Ran power to the power connector. Also had to run a fine wire where I'd broken a trace. Picked blue because that's fairly traditional for "oops, it's broken" type repairs.

Plugged it in, and presto.



Fabricated a bracket To stop if from flapping about inside, after all, this is a portable:



...found the issue, I've got some bad RAM with some sticky bits or a bad address line. Weeding out the failed chip right now by inserting the new ones one at a time into a bank full of known good RAM and testing it with CheckIt.



--Phil

Nice work!!

I too am a big fan of the Compaq luggables, I have a Portable, Portable II, and Portable III myself. I have not yet done much with my original portable, its suffering from the dreaded "foam pad disintegration" in the keyboard, so not many of its keys work, so not much point in beefing it up yet since I can't use it. But my Portable II and III are pretty beefed up with multi-GB hard drives (actually running on the stock Compaq IDE controller, utilizing full drive capacity with OnTrack DDO), extra ram on AST Memory cards, and NIC's running MS-NET mapping drives to my 750GB NAS.

Since this afternoon it's decided to stop booting from the CF.

I think I'm just going to start over- I had 6 chips of bad RAM causing random errors and corruption. Gone through those this afternoon and am currently working on 576kb. I'm going to write Jameco and see what their "broken RAM from NOS stuff" policy is. 3 chips that failed with zero output, two with a few sticky bits and one that could cause the computer to lock up solid if it was inserted in the parity bit socket.

This one had the foam pad problem also. I fixed that with foam sheet, contact adhesive and a sheet of aluminized Mylar from the sports store for about $5 total. the video stage needs recapping as does the PSU but it's running pretty well despite a few hiccups.

--Phil

HELP!

The XT-IDE BIOS finds the CF disk, says Booting C > C

It tries the floppy drive then hangs

If I boot via floppy then all the drives are available. It doesn't even give Non System Disk Or Disk Error whilst booting.
I tried wiping the thing blank and redoing the partitions. I ran SYS.COM and copied from the working hard drive to floppy, then copied to the CF and it told me System Transfered but the CF still won't boot.
It just stopped for no reason. It did boot initially.. just not now.

Any thoughts as to why MS-DOS 6.22 wouldn't boot, or just stop booting randomly?

--Phil

Usually it's because of 386 code on the CompactFlash boot sector. Try running FDISK /MBR.

My guess is the bad RAM caused some corruption on the CF card. Make sure the RAM is good before doing any writing to disk. Also, you should partition the drive on the Portable (with XTIDE Universal BIOS), not with your XP machine. Lastly, you might want to try fdisk /mbr if it just hangs after "Booting C > C ".

Hope this helps!

You know, because it was accessible, I didn't think to run FDISK. I recall now that was part of the process before.

Thanks for jarring my memory on such a simple thing. Can tell it was late last night..

I'll see how that goes. Was most likely memory corruption writing an incorrect bit.

Phil

Tried deleting the partition and re-adding, fdisk didn't like the size of the drive and locked up.

Back to square one. Still doesn't boot.

Phil

If I were you, I'd put the CF card in a different PC, then actually delete the whole partition table, move it back over to the Compaq, and then FDISK. And maybe FDISK /MBR too, just to be sure.

Wiped the card clean with FDISK.
Added a primary partition of 2G and the rest an extended with logical drives.
Set the primary active.


Formatted it and transferred system files.



Same result. Left it to sit there for ten minutes, nothing. Unresponsive, not even ctrl-alt-del does anything.

Found a very good way to really crash the xtide bios. Set the second partition active and give it boot files...

Phil

Props to jmetal88.

I forgot about the /mbr flag of FDISK.

It boots!

Phil

PhilipA said:

Props to jmetal88.

I forgot about the /mbr flag of FDISK.

It boots!

Phil

Click to expand...

Late to the party coming back to this thread, but yeah "fdisk /mbr" does wonders on a hosed boot sector, lol

Yeah, despite everything giving indication that the mbr was fine.

Next up, finding some wires with nice connectors on, moving the light board up front and redoing four of the lights as drive access indicators.
The old Plus card didn't have a header for a light, it just put a + in the top right corner of the screen by writing directly to the video RAM.

Phil

It's nice to know that works. I was going to try the CF card route, then found a 426mb drive in my parts drawer and a copy of Ontrack that allowed me to get the drive up and running in my Portable II.