Windows 3.1/Dos 6.22 PCMCIA Support Issues

[pcuser451]

So the situation is this.

I have a 486 laptop with (1) Type III PCMCIA slot , and (1) CF To PCMCIA Adapter with an 256MB CF Card. I have loaded MSDOS 6.22 and Win 3.1 onto said laptop. I want to use said cardbus slot to load software. Nothing seems to be able to work with the CF card & CF To PCMCIA Adapter.

I tried SystemSoft CardSoft, which did recognize the card , but would not see any of the files in said card, and stated that there was 0 bytes on the CF card. I tired utilizing it's formating software, and that did format the drive so that the laptop's native dos could see it, but it would not be recognized by any of my other machines, including retro ones. I did read through the available documentation and tried to follow thier steps, but no luck.

I tried Phoniex soft, which also saw the drive, but the software would not do anything. There's also very little documentation to help in that case.

Granted there I am an amateur at this, so I'm not sure if it's fault on my end, but I am my wits end here. If there is a thread on this somewhere, or if someone has an idea on how they can help, please feel free to reply below.

Thanks

 

[bakemono]

You can format and access the card, but then it's not recognized by other machines? It would be interesting to examine it with a sector editor on one of those other machines to see what has happened with the partitioning/filesystem...

 

[Svenska]

Use a (much) smaller CF card. The Card Services drivers for DOS were written for battery-backed SRAM cards, which held up to 4 MB or so. Your CF card is triggering all kinds of driver bugs. My 8 MB (!) card works great on all systems I tried, but even small 32 MB or 64 MB cards cause issues. I don't own any 16 MB cards, so I never tried them.

Windows 95 has much improved PCMCIA support (including hotplugging) and should handle your 256 MB card without issues. If you have at least 8 MB RAM in your laptop, try that instead.

You can also use Linux 2.2.x or 2.4.x, but pcmcia-cs is a pain to setup. If you are not familiar with Linux, I don't recommend trying.

 

[pcuser451]

Use a (much) smaller CF card. The Card Services drivers for DOS were written for battery-backed SRAM cards, which held up to 4 MB or so. Your CF card is triggering all kinds of driver bugs. My 8 MB (!) card works great on all systems I tried, but even small 32 MB or 64 MB cards cause issues. I don't own any 16 MB cards, so I never tried them.

Windows 95 has much improved PCMCIA support (including hotplugging) and should handle your 256 MB card without issues. If you have at least 8 MB RAM in your laptop, try that instead.

You can also use Linux 2.2.x or 2.4.x, but pcmcia-cs is a pain to setup. If you are not familiar with Linux, I don't recommend trying.

Intresting. I never really thought 256 MB was a big amount , but I guess yeah that may be an issue. I have been thinking about installing windows 95 RTM onto the laptop instead , to solve a lot of headaches. Thankfully it does meet all the requirements, including RAM