I have an IBM 5160 I've been customizing for a while. I think I've mentioned it once or twice on this forum. It was no cherry when I got it and had a few interesting mods that i had to back out to get it to behave, plus the usual exploding tantalum caps. But pretty much what is expected nowadays with a 40 year old machine. I've had the machine running with no problems for a bit and have been able to investigate a few of the problems that I came across when I was modifying it.
A couple of mods I've put in involve swapping the left bay full height floppy for a half height 3.5" 720k floppy and a half height 5.25" 360k floppy. Both are connected to the original IBM floppy controller. Instead of the full height HDD in the right hand bay I have a pair of IDE-CF adapters connected to a Glitchworks XTIDE card. I believe it is a v3. It does not have the "slot 8" hardware mod. When the machine boots the XUB identifies as v1.1.5 dated 11/28/10.
I have a small collection of CF cards I've been tinkering with. Some are cheapos I grabbed off of our favorite auction site from MemoryPartners.com. A couple are SanDisk units I "inherited" after we upgraded my son's Digital SLR. One is a SanDisk i bought new from BestBuy. My question involves two of the cards from MemoryPartners.com. XUB identifies all but three of my cards as LBA28 except for 3 that it says are L-CHS. Two of those are the subject of my question.
XUB says one of them is a 97.9MiB, the other a 79.7 MiB. I had to look at those twice to verify my occasional dyslexia wasn't acting up. In both cases the field where the manufacturer info often shows up is blank. With both cards the symptoms are the same. Boot the machine off of MSDOS 6.22 in A: and the target CF card in the first (master) CF slot. FDISK /STATUS shows no partitions on the card. I ran FDISK again with no options, then selected (4) to display any existing partitions. FDISK again said there were none. I walked through to options to create a primary DOS partition using the whole card, made the partition active, then hit ESC to write the changes and reboot off of the floppy. At that point I should have been able to do a FORMAT /S C:, but DOS said there was no C: drive. Sure enough, FDISK still said there were no partitions on the CF card. I even did an FDISK /MBR to try and eliminate the possibility that garbage in the first sector was messing FDISK up but the results stayed the same. To verify my setup and procedure was correct, I grabbed the third card in the stack that was L-CHS. XUB says it is a 249.2 MiB SimpleTech Flash. Once again XUB said the card had no partitions. FDISK agreed and I walked through the same steps to create a DOS primary using the whole card, made it active, and hit ESC to reboot from floppy. However, with this card I was able to do a FORMAT /S C: and COPY *.* C:, and end up with a working minimal DOS 6.22 on the CF card.
So the problem is pretty much on those two unresponsive CF cards. My question is, are there any reasonable steps that I could take to wake them up and make them usable before I chuck them in the round file and move on?
A couple of mods I've put in involve swapping the left bay full height floppy for a half height 3.5" 720k floppy and a half height 5.25" 360k floppy. Both are connected to the original IBM floppy controller. Instead of the full height HDD in the right hand bay I have a pair of IDE-CF adapters connected to a Glitchworks XTIDE card. I believe it is a v3. It does not have the "slot 8" hardware mod. When the machine boots the XUB identifies as v1.1.5 dated 11/28/10.
I have a small collection of CF cards I've been tinkering with. Some are cheapos I grabbed off of our favorite auction site from MemoryPartners.com. A couple are SanDisk units I "inherited" after we upgraded my son's Digital SLR. One is a SanDisk i bought new from BestBuy. My question involves two of the cards from MemoryPartners.com. XUB identifies all but three of my cards as LBA28 except for 3 that it says are L-CHS. Two of those are the subject of my question.
XUB says one of them is a 97.9MiB, the other a 79.7 MiB. I had to look at those twice to verify my occasional dyslexia wasn't acting up. In both cases the field where the manufacturer info often shows up is blank. With both cards the symptoms are the same. Boot the machine off of MSDOS 6.22 in A: and the target CF card in the first (master) CF slot. FDISK /STATUS shows no partitions on the card. I ran FDISK again with no options, then selected (4) to display any existing partitions. FDISK again said there were none. I walked through to options to create a primary DOS partition using the whole card, made the partition active, then hit ESC to write the changes and reboot off of the floppy. At that point I should have been able to do a FORMAT /S C:, but DOS said there was no C: drive. Sure enough, FDISK still said there were no partitions on the CF card. I even did an FDISK /MBR to try and eliminate the possibility that garbage in the first sector was messing FDISK up but the results stayed the same. To verify my setup and procedure was correct, I grabbed the third card in the stack that was L-CHS. XUB says it is a 249.2 MiB SimpleTech Flash. Once again XUB said the card had no partitions. FDISK agreed and I walked through the same steps to create a DOS primary using the whole card, made it active, and hit ESC to reboot from floppy. However, with this card I was able to do a FORMAT /S C: and COPY *.* C:, and end up with a working minimal DOS 6.22 on the CF card.
So the problem is pretty much on those two unresponsive CF cards. My question is, are there any reasonable steps that I could take to wake them up and make them usable before I chuck them in the round file and move on?
