Uncreative Labs

Joined: 27 Jan 2007 Posts: 274 Location: USA

aggreeded, if you use these cf to much, they were out. you can have it as a second drive, just dont boot from it much. stick with scsi

Joined: 20 Nov 2004 Posts: 589 Location: Shandong, China

I'm not so sure that I agree with my setup of
"8 bit ISA bus -> SCSI card -> Acard Adapter -> CF Flash"
as being too complex.

There are no more components there than hooking up a standard SCSI harddisk:

8 bit ISA bus -> SCSI card -> Drive PCB -> Drive Motor

Not to mention, the Acard adapter has a significantly lower chip count than the majority of hard disk PCBs I see.

...and regarding the stability of the CF cards. I believe that there were problems with earlier generation CFs wearing out from too many writes, but those concerns seem to be overblown these days. From what I understand as long as you get one from a reputable company, you should be okay. There are already quite a few people using Acard adapters and flash in their vintage machines.

The CF card setup probably isn't for everyone as it is still not an economical solution. But, I tend to find it very convenient for transfering files between machines. It also gives me the ability to interface with a lot of new technologies that otherwise would be impossible to use on an old system.

Joined: 27 Jan 2007 Posts: 274 Location: USA

well i guess cf is ok for an xt, wont be that much of a burden one the cf. 2 gig is big for an xt. i had a 2 gig hdd in my 386, to bad it ran out of space. so i upgraded to a 120 gb drive Wink

Joined: 20 Nov 2004 Posts: 589 Location: Shandong, China

We'll have to wait and see how things turn out. I think the CF card should work fine though. I am also interested to see how well the IDE --> SD card adapters work too. Though, they are a little more complicated than the CF adapters. The SD adapters need one or two support chips, and cost about $5 more than the CF adapters. Though, currently they don't have any models available that are accessable from a front panel or a rear slot cover. I'm certain it's in the pipeline though, and I'll be sure to test it out when it's available.

120GB on a 386 is certainly a lot. It's bigger than the drive in my Core2 Duo. I was running a 1GB drive in my 386 until recently when it started having problems. I how have a 20GB drive installed as that's all I had on hand, and not I'm not expecting to ever fill it. So did you get Windows XP going on your 386 yet?

Joined: 27 Jan 2007 Posts: 274 Location: USA

its win 2k, xp is next. i got win 98 to work fine though, not half bad. 16mb RAM helps ALOT. how is the ati memory board comeing along?

Joined: 20 Nov 2004 Posts: 589 Location: Shandong, China

Windows 2000 on 16MB RAM eh? It must be pretty stripped down. Good luck with XP. I don't think anybody has yet been able to get it to work on less than a 63MHz Pentium Overdrive on a 486 motherboard.

I've been pretty busy at work and haven't been able to look at it for a few days. Though, right now the problem is that my layout BMP doesn't seem to be the right DPI, and the component tracings aren't lining up properly with the ones in the image. I need to read more documentation, and I may need to start over with my tracings.

Joined: 27 Jan 2007 Posts: 274 Location: USA

correction, someone clock a p60 to 7mhz and 18 mb ram got xp to load

Joined: 20 Nov 2004 Posts: 589 Location: Shandong, China

It's definetly been done on a POD63 (clocked down to around 8MHz or so). I believe it was on a German website. They tried 486 chips, but it seems that Windows XP might use some Pentium specific code, and was unable to boot.

Joined: 27 Jan 2007 Posts: 274 Location: USA

when i hooked up a win xp drive too my 386, it said some error about ntldr missing, press ctrl + alt + del to restart, mabey i sould try the mmx emulator i saw on sourceforge.net

Joined: 19 Apr 2006 Posts: 261 Location: WisConSin

386ser you won't get around the XP black or blue screen of death without recoding the initial bootstrap and bootup drivers to be 386 compatible, (which may be doing given the relatively small amount of non-386 code) another issue is chipset compatibility, many of my 486 systems had issues with 2000 (not even XP yet) because of chipset issues. A few had issues with hard disk size that only occured with XP and not under 98, not sure why.

Good Luck

Joined: 19 Oct 2004 Posts: 138 Location: Lynnwood,WA

Well, I am one of the few here who can vouch for 2000 on a 486, since I have done it on 48MB of RAM on a 100 MHz CPU. I have not tried XP, but that is a tempting thing to try. I would not be so sure if the problem with XP on a 486 would be the copy protection rather than the code, since it is mostly just Windows 2000 with added stuff.

I've been almost tempted to mess around with various versions of Windows on the 286 outside the realm of 3.1x and lower. I read somewhere years ago online, that some crazy person got Windows 2000 a good ways through loading on an 80286, so this could be interesting.

Joined: 27 Jan 2007 Posts: 274 Location: USA

what the hell, tonight i'll hook up a windows vista harddrive , just for kicks Wink

Joined: 27 Jan 2007 Posts: 274 Location: USA

crap, my old vista drive died Evil or Very Mad

last WD caviar im pulling from a dumpster Wink

tobad i lost my cd key, can you say time stop Laughing

Joined: 20 Nov 2004 Posts: 589 Location: Shandong, China

I tend to agree about the WDs. I've never had one that didn't die.

I wouldn't bother with XP on a 486. The possibility has already been explored pretty well, and it seems it can't work without some modification.

It's the same with Windows 2000 on a 286. 286s don't work in 386 protected mode. 286s can't even boot windows 3.11 or 95, much less a full blown 32-bit OS like Windows 2000. With a 486SLC upgrade chip you *might* get the install to run...but it will be pretty unspectacular even if you get to the desktop.

Joined: 27 Jan 2007 Posts: 274 Location: USA

but the 386 is 32 bit, its still worth trying with win 2k. oh by the way, i heard that Tiny xp works on a 486 and 5x86es