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486 Laptop not behaving with Industrial CF Cards

NeXT

NeXT

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Joined
Oct 22, 2008
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Location
Kamloops, BC, Canada
I'm repalcing the 300mb Type III PCMCIA hard drive in my Badger laptop with a 2gb SanDisk Industrial Grade 2gb card. I'm using the utility I used with my PC110 to make it bootable, then dump the Windows 95 CD onto it for the install. The problem is that the computer is not behaving with the card. I can sys it and that will work boot fine. I can see files and move through directories fine as well. If I add the win95 folder and Setup.exe I can't run the setup because ScanDisk complains that LBA is not enabled on the card and it just starts marking random clusters on the card as bad. I can run Scandisk on another Windows 95 system and it reports absolutely no problems with the card.
If I were to copy my entire Windows CD to the card I can't even run the setup. It just gives a Sector Not Found error.
Now this is where things get weird. If I sys a SanDisk Ultra II 512mb consumer grade card and try the install there is absolutely no problems. I can't spare the 512 unfortunately as I use it in another system plus it would be too small for my liking (and I ahve a pile of these Industrial Grade cards). The laptop has no onboard IDE. The disk has to plug into an internal PCMCIA slot so that's they I went Compact Flash. Am I running into a problem with the computer or with the Industrial Grade cards not behaving 100% to the ATA standard?
 
I can't begin to think how long it's going to take to get the "badger badger badger" song out of my head but have you tried a smaller partition on the CF drive? I wouldn't think 2gb would be a problem though. Have you found the card to be stable on any other system?
 
Huh. Some older IDE controllers (such as the one in my Amiga 1200) don't get along with certain brands of CF card in an adapter, but Sandisk is usually one of the sure bets...still, have you tried any other brand? If your smaller-capacity Sandisk card works with it, it's probably just that specific card that it doesn't get along with...
 
I also tried a generic chinese 128mb card and that worked. Everything else I ahve are those Industrial Grade cards. I was hoping on them to be useable so I could build a few laptops and tablets.
 
Wasnt 512 one of the size limitations? Perhaps you need to use one of the 'bios expanders' on it to get it to work correctly with the whole thing?
 
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