It took some time until the CF card to IDE adapter arrived form the US (I couldn't find any source around here or in Germany: strange ! they only sell PCMCIA dadapters which is quite e different thing) and until I could mount it. It works well but not precisely as advertised:
While the OSs recognize it immediately as "Secondary master" fixed disk - physically the adapter is linked with the appropriate IDE cable to the connector on the motherboard for a second HD -, it's qualification of being "hotpluggable" is highly relative: The CF card (there should be one in the slot with booting) must _not_ be exchanged with another one of different type/made and/_or_ of another capacity, on pain of irritating behaviour under DOS and severe hard crashes under Linux. (I don't bother with Winno$.) With DOS, a 64-MB card plugged in instead of the 8-MB one with which it was booted, results in a wrong reading of the "d:" drive (the one which is assigned to the "Secondary master" whith booting), only a capacity of 8 MB is recognized instead of the full 64 MB, and an existing directory structure is not seen as all but only as "lost clusters" when doing a "chkdsk". In linux, "umount /cf-drive" (the point where it is mounted with a filesystem type of "msdos" in the "/" root directory), exchanging the card with another one with other capacity, then "mount /cf-drive" results in a hard hung machine, with the destruction of "mtab" - a specifictly severe condition because any rebooting would result in an inaccessible file system, the booting/mounting sequence complaining about "missing or corrupted mtab~", and a reboot in failsafe mode, with a following filecheck with potentially dangerous repairs is the only way out. This is a serious handicap. At first instance I didn't notice the problem as I tested it only with two identical cards whith which it seems to work Ok. But that's not reality where the important thing would be to just exchange all sorts of data containing CF cards with different capacities. I wonder if there's any means to get around it, especially in Linux (as there it is, contrary to DOS, quite wearisome to reboot all the time.) // Heimo Claasen // <hammer at revobild dot net> // Brussels 2002-12-22 The WebPlace of ReRead - and much to read ==> http://www.revobild.net To unsubscribe from SURVPC send a message to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with unsubscribe SURVPC in the body of the message. Also, trim this footer from any quoted replies. More info can be found at; http://www.softcon.com/archives/SURVPC.html
