Hi, I have two CF adapters. A front side floppy size Startech one in an Athlon XP system that had an AsRock VIA motherboard until a few days ago when I upgraded it to an EPoX nForce 2 motherboard. Then I have another chinese one that is mounted on the back in an extension bracket on an IBM Aptiva P200 MMX with an Ali motherboard. I have never had any problem with any of these 3 motherboards. I have three kinds of CF cards. One 32Gb Sandisk that I use for FreeBSD and earlier for Windows XP and Arch Linux 32 on the Athlon, one 1Gb brandless one that came with an ALIX 2D3 that I use for FreeDOS on both PCs and a bunch of 2Gb and 4Gb Apacer ones for DR-DOS, MS-DOS, Windows NT 4 and Windows 95 on the Aptiva. All work fine on any combination. Note that microdrives also work in CF adapters but these are 3000 and some RPMs. So they are very slow.
If I need a swap file, I'll just put it on a regular hard drive. I use a cheap Silicon Image SATA PCI card in the Aptiva and use it with a 160Gb hard drive from a laptop I upgraded to an SSD. Works great in NT4 and I can put the swap file on there. I have two 320Gb hard drives in RAID 1 with a 3ware 8006-@LP in the Athlon XP system and would just put the swap file on there if I needed one. You won't run into any removable bit problems unless you install something newer than NT4. Usually cards that don't have the removable bit set are those advertised as "Industrial". Windows XP will install without complaining on a CF with the removable bit set but some dumb software can refuse to install because of it. Linux and FreeBSD do not care whether the removable bit is set or not. No DOS family OS cares about that either. None of the BIOSes I used with the CF adapters treat the CF differently than a hard drive but I think that has more to do with the CF adapter than with the CF cards. Be warned that up to date Linux is bitrotting hard on 32 bit machines. I used to have Arch Linux 32 on the Athlon system and besides the problem of a lot of software throwing SIGILL because they are compiled with SSE2 instructions, the kernel is pretty unstable too last I checked. A lot of Linux people being paid by big corporations don't give a shit about testing on older hardware. I have since moved to FreeBSD which still works great on 32bit. Also up to date Linux will mostlikely not work with anything less than 128 Mb of RAM without X. _______________________________________________ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
