A tip for those designing new hardware for vintage machines...

[syzygy]

I've identified the problem - no method for wiping CF card that works.
I've identified a path forward - return device, revisit at a future date, after having a process to build other DOS disks.
I've moved on to other projects and things, which includes getting back to the option of troubleshooing and fixing the blue lava card that has a working CF card that should still boot once it detects it.
I've identified ideal option to see if one is suggested - wiping method from USB device.

It can be very difficult to 'help' someone over delayed forum posts where the slightest misunderstanding takes a lot of effort to work out. I am regularly amazed when the endeavor is successful.

Many people on here want to help people solve problems and it becomes an investment of sorts. It is important for you, as the one asking for the help, to, at the least, acknowledge the efforts of others in a sincere manner. I think that you do appreciate the help that people are willing to provide, but it gets lost in all the whining; I am sorry of that is harsh but you have been do a lot a lot of whining.

Regarding your analysis of the problem (the 4 points of yours that I am quoting). You just can't make those statements and be confident that they are correct. This is so because you have not gone through the proper steps to make evidence-based decisions.

Start with the first one - when I asked if you looked to see what, if anything, 'wipedisk' had done in your case - you asked, "how" and I replied "sector editor" and you started whining - that was many, many posts ago. I figure, if I care more about solving the problem than you do, I should stop caring about the problem.

Here is what I did in about a minute....took a CF card that I had previously formatted and made bootable - ready to backup the one in my XT. Ran the HXD editor and looked at the first sector and a snapshot is below.



Notice that 55 AA at the end of the sector? Remember when that came up about a billion posts ago?

IF you had done this; for both the CF card in the Blue Lava board that had previously booted and worked AND for the new CF cards that you had just purchased and formatted with a version of DOS 3.2 (as far as I can tell), it would have given you and the folks trying to help you solve the problem, some evidence of what is going on. The old card that worked in the Blue Lava board could have been damaged when the card stopped working, your 'wipedisk' may not have been working, the new cards may have come with a funky MBR, and more.

That would have been a step in the right direction, but when I said 'sector editor' you whined that you did not want to do that. I told you, and will say it again; "That is a reasonable response - you don't have to do it". If you don't do the steps to get the evidence, however, you are deluding yourself into believing the conclusions that you have drawn without commensurate evidence.

How did I get that program that I am running on a Win 7 machine? Someone here told me about it - lots of people here use it - some like other programs - the linuxites will always weigh in with their favorites and so on. Heck, I used to use "diskprobe.exe" back in the XP days.

But see, we couldn't get that far because you did not want to get that far.....but please, acknowledge that many folks in this thread tried to help and it looks to me like you didn't want to do your part of helping yourself....and again, that's perfectly ok, but it would be nice to hear you simply say something like, "thanks for the help guys, but I don't want to go through all that"....and leave it at that.

 

[Eudimorphodon]

I've identified the problem - no method for wiping CF card that works.

If you have a unix-related machine handy:

1. Insert the card into a reader.
2. Most modern OSes will detect and auto-mount it if it has a recognizable filesystem on it. So unmount it. I’m not explaining this because I don’t know which hypothetical unix system you’re using, and before you unmount it you need to look at the mount table and see what the base device of the card is. (In most unixes there will be a base node and separate numbered nodes for each partition. We want to nuke the whole drive, not a partition.)
3. Run this as root: dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/whateverthecf bs=512 count=1024

Congratulations, you just nuked the first 512k your card so DOS 3.3 can write an MBR without confusing leftovers.

I’m not a windows person, but I know tools to wipe a disk pristine clean exist and I think several people have already suggested them. Haven’t seen you lift a finger to try them.

 

[JonnyGators]

I appreciate all the helpful suggestions, and I suppose my dismissal of the alternate methods is coming across as refusal or difficult.

That isn't the case. At this point its because I've returned the device. Maybe I called it quits too soon. Maybe I was just 10 minutes away from getting it done. Basically, I had expectations on what the setup requirements and challenge level would be for the new device, and wasn't prepared to deal with the situation that unfolded, and gave up and decided it wasn't worth my time to go down this path. At that point, I'm explaining my reasons for being at that point of dissatisfaction and exiting, while people are continuing to do what is natural to them, continue troubleshooting and suggestions, which can only be met by resistance at this point since I no longer own the device.

It's not refusal, it's a decision to quit that I've held to as further suggestions come in.

I appreciate all the help that came in, and perhaps there's some useful information in this thread if it comes up in a search for someone else, I do hate threads that go nowhere and then end with "oh, I fixed it", so at least there are lots of options here for others to pursue if they are similarly stuck.

But the next steps forward are fixing a broken blue lava card that isn't detecting anything, which will resume when the replacement CF card adapter comes in - perhaps it was a simple case of bent pins and replacing that component will fix it.

The machine I rebuilt this weekend does have a 5.25 drive in it, so maybe I can even dig up some floppies and make a 6.22 boot disk at that point, to see if I can make the new flash card work on the blue lava card once it's working again.

Again, thanks for all the helpful tips, but there's really nothing further to do here until work resumes on the blue lava card, and at that point it's not anything to do with CF cards until it can detect them again.

 

[JonnyGators]

If you have a unix-related machine handy:

1. Insert the card into a reader.
2. Most modern OSes will detect and auto-mount it if it has a recognizable filesystem on it. So unmount it. I’m not explaining this because I don’t know which hypothetical unix system you’re using, and before you unmount it you need to look at the mount table and see what the base device of the card is. (In most unixes there will be a base node and separate numbered nodes for each partition. We want to nuke the whole drive, not a partition.)
3. Run this as root: dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/whateverthecf bs=512 count=1024

Congratulations, you just nuked the first 512k your card so DOS 3.3 can write an MBR without confusing leftovers.

I’m not a windows person, but I know tools to wipe a disk pristine clean exist and I think several people have already suggested them. Haven’t seen you lift a finger to try them.

I have a unix VM, not sure if that will treat the device properly since it would be coming through my Windows machine to the VM, and didn't feel like adding that into the mix. Best to keep things simple for troubleshooting.

If someone has suggested a windows tool to wipe a disk pristine clean, I've not seen that, perhaps I overlooked it in all the other comments that have been perceived by me as noise of annoyance over my not having a DOS boot disk with the correct fdisk version.

 

[Malc]

and I've yet to find a way to verify or wipe the card using a USB adapter on a Windows machine.

Have a look at https://hddguru.com/ and HxD as already mentioned,

 

[Eudimorphodon]

I would recommend against this. Even an SD card will require a working MBR in order to be bootable, and you seem unwilling to create one.

Your only real option is to buy a preconfigured card and hope that you will never wipe it.

That is a reasonable point, but it's only tangentially related to the reason why I suggested the card that's sold with the SD card adapter mated to it is a good idea. The argument I was making here is that this option moves the system compatibility goalposts in a useful way.

A bare XT-CF intended to work with a user supplied card is little more than a bus adapter; a vendor selling one is basically in the position of someone selling a 16 bit ISA adapter guaranteeing that it'll work with every IDE drive the user might plug into it. (Except it's actually a worse position, because it's a known issue that CFs are trickier beasts than standard IDE devices.) When someone's selling an 8-bit XTIDE device pre-mated to an SD adapter I would say it's more analogous to selling a whole drive, because it makes the interface between the new-tech storage controller and the bus connector a known quantity and the vendor can tweak the BIOS settings specifically for a drive they've tested.

(That drive happens to take removable media in the form of the SD cards so, sure, the possibility still exists that the user might find a card incompatible with the firmware/ASIC on the SD-to-ATA chip, but... again, as long as the vendor is actually testing their SD adapters with known good cards it eliminates the possibility of CF electrical/protocol incompatibility. You might still have bus/BIOS incompatibilites with any given host machine, there were a lot of different XT compatibles and some were less compatible than others, but it does at least slightly tweak the odds in your favor.)

 

[modem7]

I sometimes use 'FDISK' from the FreeDos project to erase the partitions and boot code ...

I am unsure as to why you added the quoted line to the post. How does that relate to wiping/clearing/zeroing (all of) the first sector, the MBR.

Free FDISK Command Line Syntax, I don't use it frequently but it works for me,

I see now. The FDISK in FreeDOS has a /CLEARMBR option, which from the description, deletes all partitions and the master boot code. And maybe it deletes the signature bytes as well.

 

[Lutiana]

At this point its because I've returned the device

OP no longer has the device that this thread is about. So I am going to close the thread down before it degrades further than it has. But as a general reminder, please remain civil. There are quite a few posts in this thread that definitely approach the line on this.