[nubinetwork]

Can I get a tldr? Can't watch until I get home, but I was looking over the github and I'm curious about how this works...

It sounds like we're supposed to scavenge the nand and controller off an ssd and solder it to their board... but can I carve out 200/500mb disks out of it like other drive emulators, or are we still stuck trying to put a 256gb ssd into a machine that can't support disks that large?

Edit: from my POV the issue isn't "I can't plug a nvme into my ide-only 286” but rather "I can't find a cf card small enough, and that the bios is happy enough with to allow the system to boot"

[unquietwiki]

https://tldp.org/HOWTO/Large-Disk-HOWTO-4.html

Since this is a custom application, I suspect you'd have to figure out where on this list your use case falls and use the appropriate NAND set.

[nubinetwork]

That's not even a complete list, because there are some old BIOSes that won't boot from a drive that's not part of the "type xx" standard...

Also, some BIOSes only allowed a small handful of those types (completely ignoring IBM because they were so picky you couldn't even replace your floppy/disk controller with another IBM branded one - it had to be the model the PC shipped with or screw you)

Retro do be like that sometimes :)

Edit: the tables in the hard drive bible PDFs really come in handy https://archive.org/details/bitsavers_cscCSCHardn1996_266711...

[hakfoo]

I think there reaches a point where you outsource the problem to something like the XT-IDE Universal BIOS, which does more than what the name says. (It's also configurable for use as an option ROM for machines with normal IDE)

I'm fond of the SD-IDE adapters because these days, CF cards are harder to find, and some are not 100% happy with straight CF-IDE adaptors, but the SD-IDE adaptor has to do stuff and so is better at compatibility.

When I threw one in my 386SX, the BIOS didn't like it. It didn't autodetect, and although it claimed to support drives up to 8Gb, it would do weird stuff and refuse to boot on a 4GB card, even if I said "just use 100Mb of it".

On XUB, it autodetects fine and I just set up a 2GB partition because it's the largest FAT16 will support, and far more than you need when the original drive was 40Mb.

Added plus: the easiest way to add it is to buy a $15 NIC and slap the ROM in the boot-ROM socket, so now it has networking.

[nubinetwork]

I've pondered going all SCSI and using a SCSI emulator... Summer project perhaps :)