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CF HDD "solidifies" after a few mins

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xjas

Experienced Member
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Jul 9, 2015
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I have a 512MB Sandisk CF card in my 386 in a CF-IDE adapter. Lately I've noticed it works fine for a few minutes when cold booted, but after that it becomes impossible to write to. Attempted writes cause a long delay and then a disk I/O error. You can use it all day long if you only read from it, but as soon as anything tries a write it's game over.

I've never had a *read* error from it, FWIW.

This is a relatively-recent problem; it didn't happen when I built the machine last year. I don't use the thing every day so I don't know exactly when this started.

Any ideas what's going on here? Is the card dieing? I don't have another 512MB card to replace it with but I could try a 256.
 
If the card does not do 'wear levelling' there is a good chance that some sectors are beyond there maximum number of writes when used as a harddisk replacement.
 
If running Windows95 or newer, or some other virtual memory system, possibly. If not, I don't expect it would run into that yet (if ever). Even so, that shouldn't only come into play with time after cold boot, every time, I wouldn't think.

It sounds like the card or controller is overheating to me. It could just be a defective card. I've got a couple of SD cards that have gone bad. One won't read or write at all anymore, and the other goes corrupt over time (gets read and write errors at some amount of time after formatting). All the SD cards that I use are in heavy service. One is a hard drive replacement in a very active Amiga, three are used in RaspberryPi servers, one for a camera (gets completely filled and erased every four days), and the rest are in Android devices. I don't have any CF cards but I think they use roughly the same technology. One died in an Android phone, the other in a camera.
 
Might be the CF card or more likely the adapter if it's one of the cheap chinese adapters, I've found if the adapter works, They can often die after some use.
 
FWIW, my money is on a defective controller. My CF cards have been and are now in constant use without any problems. I would suggest keeping a small inventory of those cheap Chinese CF adapters on hand.
 
What voltage is the adapter supplying to the CF card? CFs are supposed to be able to run at 3.3 or 5V, but you'll have fewer problems with heating effects if 3.3V is used.
 
Agent Orange said:
FWIW, my money is on a defective controller. My CF cards have been and are now in constant use without any problems. I would suggest keeping a small inventory of those cheap Chinese CF adapters on hand.
Click to expand...

I'm not ruling this out as a possibility, but I've had the adapter since 2014 and have never had this happen until with this system. It could have also failed from use, as Malc suggested (although I don't really know how.) It's basically just a pin adapter: two CF slots, a master/slave switch, and a power connector. No chips or active circuitry.

I'm only using one CF slot, the other IDE port goes to a Zip drive which exhibits no such issues.

Chuck(G) said:
What voltage is the adapter supplying to the CF card? CFs are supposed to be able to run at 3.3 or 5V, but you'll have fewer problems with heating effects if 3.3V is used.
Click to expand...

It uses a floppy power connector, so I'm guessing 5V? I'll open it up and see what lines actually go to it.
 
That look exactly the problem I have with my controller. It turns out that I can use one of my CF (Sandisk 128mb) but not two other ones (Sandisk xxgb and Transcend 256mb).

The two later show exactly the same symptom as yours : bright fixed activity red light on the adapter, and a write error after some time.
Do you experience FAT corruption after that ?

I've no explainations, I will pay close attention to your searches !
 
I didn't have time to disassemble the machine but I found a few pics of the adapter. It definitely doesn't seem to have any onboard voltage regulation.

cf-ide1.jpgcf-ide2.jpg

Would it be a terrible idea to just put a big resistor on the 5V pin to bring it down to 3.3V?

PePe-fr said:
Do you experience FAT corruption after that ?
Click to expand...
No signs of any data corruption; it continues to work as normal if you make sure not to try to write to it.
 
Terrible idea? Not quite how I'd say it, but otherwise, yes. That only works for static loads, which I wouldn't expect something line this to be.
 
Sometimes these cheap adapters used three diodes in series to reduce the voltage, crude but works ok most of the time.
 
Seems to me that putting in a voltage regulator would just act as a band aid. I've found that those cheap adapters seem to work with any PC power supply with no problems. Put a new one in for a few bucks and forget about it.
 
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