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A tip for those designing new hardware for vintage machines...

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JonnyGators said:
Anyways, that's my final say on the matter of the texelec device. Working or not, it did not meet my requirements for a successful device, and is going back, I am done with texelec, they have failed to sell me something that works or is supported to my requirements for success, I'm moving along.
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I've asked you three questions to guide you through the process - you answered none.
You keep babbling about business practices while being on an enthusiast forum - where everyone and their mother boots from CFs and couple of people have came out to help you.

You also seem to lack skills, tools and will to learn or re-learn stuff. You won't get far.
 
Chuck(G) said:
If you suspect the XTIDE board, send it to me and I'll make it work if you pay postage. Otherwise, we're just moving hot air here.
I don't think that you'll get a better offer than that.
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Thank you Chuck for getting back on topic. I will keep this offer in mind after I've done my own poking around and troubleshooting with the blue lava board.

Meanwhile - I went to retrieve the parts for my Pentium 133 build, and couldn't find them, which led to a realization that I may or may not remember what I have or haven't bought, and may have been confused about different projects and desired projects. But, I wanted to get something vintage up and running to test out my new speakers. So I dug out the Pentium 4 XP/98 dual boot machine that needed a rebuild with a replacement mobo, to reassess the state of that pile of parts. Well, as I remembered, the bracket that holds the heat sink had a broken portion which results in a heat sink only being half held in place. But, I still had the old mobo, which had the same problem. But - saw 2 broken brackets in half, use the 2 good halves, and problem solved. A bit of moving some parts back and forth, a bit of trouble shooting, and it's back up and running, and the speakers work great on it.

Of course, while digging around looking for thermal paste, I stumbled onto a box with the mobo and Pentium 133 processor that I was originally looking for. Turns out I remembered correctly and did still have them. Perhaps next weekend.

And at some point I want to try further troubleshooting on the dead MFM drive that BC88 number 4 came with, which is what had all these BC88s up from the basement in the first place.

Not to mention the box of 100 or so quadraphonic 8-tracks sent to me to spool onto reels and digitize as time permits - got some 4 tops recorded in today, but I suspect the machine may need some calibration and I'll have to redo that.

And at some point I need to get back to scanning in the negatives of the family photos to get those all digitized, might want to get some summer beach photos over the years gathered together to update some digital frames for the summer.

Plenty to do...this kinda sums up why I get so upset when a purchase that's supposed to bring progress to something turns into another project.

Anyways.....actually got something working this weekend, not what I planned to get working, but....a weekend that results in something working that previously wasn't is a good weekend.

Will come back to this thread when I get back to troubleshooting the blue lava card.
 
You keep going on about the requirements: did the site from which you bought this explicitly say that they supported your OS configurations? Or did they say, perhaps, something along the lines of "DOS 5.0 or 6.22 are probably best," which to me seems pretty clearly to indicate that you might have a bit of work to do if you want to use a different OS.

JonnyGators said:
If I were going to sell this product, I would get all the answers needed to make this work, and include that on the sales listing or site for the product....
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Discovering all the ways a client can muck up an install is a huge amount of work, and involves things like creating new floppies with new OS versions to test. Given that you have been unwilling to do that just once for your own project, I can't see you doing that with a dozen different OSes for others.

BTW, you can quite easily boot Linux off of a USB drive, flash or otherwise, on most modern computers, if you need to use a Linux tool that's not available on Windows. And there's always WSL2 as well, of course, though that may or may not work depending on how low-level the tool you need is.
 
modem7 said:
Alternately, a wipe of the first sector on the CF was attempted, but understandably, the OP expected the methods provided to wipe all of the CF (even the DISPART tool in Windows 10 does not wipe all sectors by default). Verification that first sector wiped not attempted.
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JonnyGators said:
I do not know how to verify that the first sector was wiped with the wipe tool that was run, but it was definitely verified that I ran the command, the command returned that it completed the wipe, and further attempts to partition, format, install DOS on the CF card, had the same consistent results of being non-booting, but otherwise functional.
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Re: the Lo-Tech WipeDisk utility ( If that is what you used ) is a very simple tool, It only supports the first hard drive and does little error checking as far as i can see.

As an experiment i just removed the CF card from my Amstrad PC1640, I booted up with the CF removed and obviously the XUB reported no drive found, I then booted from a bootable DOS 6.22 floppy disk which had the WipeDisk utility on it, I pressed Uppercase 'C' and it went through the motions of erasing the CF, I then saw ' ERASING....DONE it then quit with no errors reported, Obviously it had done nowt.

I sometimes use 'FDISK' from the FreeDos project to erase the partitions and boot code from DOS or i use a windows utility on my XP computer.
 
Down the track, as part of diagnosis, we may be in the situation of wanting some level of assurance that a wipe of the first sector, the MBR, did in fact happen.
For example, we suspect that a technical reason or user reason (e.g. typo) resulted in the MBR not getting wiped.
Accordingly, for whenever, I have created a 'Vintage PC - Verifying that the MBR is wiped/zeroed' web page at minuszerodegrees.net
Accessible via the 'Master boot record (MBR)' entry in the index page.
 
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JonnyGators said:
I suppose the most helpful comments in this thread were the ones pointing to the suggestion of buying an SD card solution,
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I would recommend against this. Even an SD card will require a working MBR in order to be bootable, and you seem unwilling to create one.

Your only real option is to buy a preconfigured card and hope that you will never wipe it.
 
Svenska said:
I would recommend against this. Even an SD card will require a working MBR in order to be bootable, and you seem unwilling to create one.

Your only real option is to buy a preconfigured card and hope that you will never wipe it.
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Not unwilling, just no one has come up with a working method to do so.
 
John with all seriousness and no real malice.

The issue is you. Your XTIDE cards work fine. Dollars to doughnuts the CF card is a type that wont play well on the XTIDE. Everyone here for some reason I cant fathom has gone way out of their way to help you even though you have been a positive Dick to most of them.

You remind me of the people I had to do tech support for when I worked for DELL. Blaming everyone but themselves... Thats not a good thing pal.
 
After reading 130+ posts about CF problems, my heart is with JonnyGators. I’ve designed CF interface to Z80, Z280, 6502, and 68K. Most of these designs also boot from CF MBR. I’ve encountered some problems with different brands of CF disks and I’ve found the fast edges of 16bit data switching simultaneously can be troublesome. I found it necessary to serially terminate the CF data lines with 100 ohm resistors and CF read line needs to be filtered with RC network. I know nothing of XTIDE and have no solution to Jonny’s current problem, but I will say this: CF can be quite tricky to interface to, and there are incompatible among different brands, so an universal CF hardware is probably not doable. If I’m the designer of XTIDE you are using and having read all the efforts you’ve put in, I would pay you to ship your problem to me so I can learn from your experiences and make my product better.
 
VERAULT said:
John with all seriousness and no real malice.

The issue is you. Your XTIDE cards work fine. Dollars to doughnuts the CF card is a type that wont play well on the XTIDE. Everyone here for some reason I cant fathom has gone way out of their way to help you even though you have been a positive Dick to most of them.

You remind me of the people I had to do tech support for when I worked for DELL. Blaming everyone but themselves... Thats not a good thing pal.
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With no malice back, your assessment is incorrect. I believe we have determined that 2 separate issues exist.
1. The blue lava card has stopped detecting CF cards. It shows on the boot that it isn't detecting any device, this is consistent for both the CF card it was working with for a few years, and the new CF card.
2. The inability to come up with a method to make a CF card bootable. Method suggested that I've tried have been to run the fdisk /mbr command, which isn't present in the version of DOS my PCs run on, and running the wipe tool, which failed to result in a bootable card. My lack of diskettes for newer versions of DOS and current inability to create them has somehow turned me into some villain to some. I simply don't have the tools, and no one has come up with a method forward with what I do have. Sue me!

Perhaps the new CF cards cannot be made bootable - I linked to what I purchased, and they visually match cards identified on another site as compatible. Perhaps the manufacturer has kept the same visual label on "updated" hardware that isn't compatible. Perhaps there's a problem with how my PCs run the wipe command. Perhaps getting a newer DOS diskette will fix it, perhaps not. But what baffles me is how we can have zero working methods to accomplish the needed task over a usb device on a Windows machine.
 
JonnyGators said:
But what baffles me is how we can have zero working methods to accomplish the needed task over a usb device on a Windows machine.
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But we do. Because that method works fine for me.. And most people.

Your non detecting card aside (did you check to make sure the pins connecting to the CF card didnt bend or smash over.. which can easily happen with repeated insertion and removal). The method is easy. Pop the NEW CF card into the XTIDE. Run fdisk, delete any existing partitions which may show up as non-DOS. Create a new one. Format it. Done.

Honestly the hardest part is IO conflicts. IF the XTIDE bios is coming up your home free at that point. The only issue is the CF card. And I assure you, NOT ALL CF CARDS WILL WORK WITH XTIDE!
 
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VERAULT said:
But we do. Because that method works fine for me.. And most people.

Your non detecting card aside (did you check to make sure the pins connecting to the CF card didnt bend or smash over.. which can easily happen with repeated insertion and removal). The method is easy. Pop the NEW CF card into the XTIDE. Run fdisk, delete any existing partitions which may show up as non-DOS. Create a new one. Format it. Done.

Honestly the hardest part is IO conflicts. IF the XTIDE bios is coming up your home free at that point. The only issue is the CF card. And I assure you, NOT ALL CF CARDS WILL WORK WITH XTIDE!
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On the blue lava card, I'm not seeing smashed pins, but they are rather small and tucked away - which is why I've ordered a replacement part to see if that resolves it.

"The method is easy. Pop the NEW CF card into the XTIDE. Run fdisk, delete any existing partitions which may show up as non-DOS. Create a new one. Format it. Done." I've done this SEVERAL TIMES! It's quite well documented on this thread. It results in a working storage device, but it doesn't boot, hence the call for running fdisk /mbr (which isn't available on my versions of DOS), or running the wipe command (which I did, appeared to work, but didn't fix things). Yes, it could be that this CF card just isn't capable of being made bootable, but that has been inconclusive, and I've yet to find a way to verify or wipe the card using a USB adapter on a Windows machine.

Not sure what you aren't understanding about this at this point.
 
JonnyGators said:
Not sure what you aren't understanding about this at this point.
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There is that dick comment I mentioned earlier. You want help but lash out at the people who give it?

Here is a suggestion. Don't get into this hobby. Its full of frustration; something you don't seem to handle without lashing out.

Some of us like the frustration because its a challenge; like solving a puzzle. You don't seem to have the nature to deal with frustration.

So maybe bowling? Crochet? Jelly of the month club?
 
VERAULT said:
There is that dick comment I mentioned earlier. You want help but lash out at the people who give it?

Here is a suggestion. Don't get into this hobby. Its full of frustration; something you don't seem to handle without lashing out.

Some of us like the frustration because its a challenge; like solving a puzzle. You don't seem to have the nature to deal with frustration.

So maybe bowling? Crochet? Jelly of the month club?
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I've identified the problem - no method for wiping CF card that works.
I've identified a path forward - return device, revisit at a future date, after having a process to build other DOS disks.
I've moved on to other projects and things, which includes getting back to the option of troubleshooing and fixing the blue lava card that has a working CF card that should still boot once it detects it.
I've identified ideal option to see if one is suggested - wiping method from USB device.

I'm neck deep in this hobby. This is more than a hobby. I work senior tech support for a living, and I'm damn good at it. I identify with the frustrated end users, because I am one of them, and that has been a strength for me. I have several working project machines that I've had much success with. I don't need you telling me what hobbies I should or shouldn't get into. Thank you for your suggestions, but really, what are you trying to accomplish at this point? Do you have some need to be right here? Ok, you're right. Absolutely and completely. I bow in your superiority.

I fail to see where signing up for a Jelly of the month club fits into all of this.
 
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