Trying to fit a CF card into a Performa 5200

[IAmTheRoflcopter]

Hey folks!

So ive been going on a mass repairing spree on our old Performa 5200, taking it apart and giving it a serious dust. Sourcing a new CD drive as the motor in the original has died, etc. Anyway i thought about swapping the internal 500MB drive out for a 1GB CF card using a Cf-IDE adapter. I ordered all the parts and it all arrived today.

Ive since spent the last 4hrs or so trying to get this thing to work to no avail. From what i can see everything is working fine with the adapter but the machine is not seeing the card. Ive booted the machine up from a system 7.5.3 Disk Tools floppy to prepare the drive but no matter what i do it doesn't see it.

Ive tried a variety of different CF cards and had the same results each time. Ive used an old OS 9 iBook to format the card as HFS to see if that would work. Nope. Ive formatted it with a APM. Nope. So at this point im kinda out of ideas.

The only thing i can think of is that the IDE controller in the 5200 doesn't recognise ATA drives (i.e it is a first gen IDE interface so doesn't see ATA or accept drives bigger than 2.1GB) Outside of this i don't know anything else so does anyone here have any idea what is going on?

Im using a typical CF-IDE interface that you can get off ebay, one that has a female IDE connection and a external power via floppy power connector affair. Using a IDE gender bender to hook it up to the IDE cable built into the machine and a molex to floppy power connector for power.

Cheers!

 

[just.in.time]

Is it set for Master/Slave/CableSelect properly?

Also, can't hurt to try an 8.1 disk tools disk.  Probably won't make a difference, but I know 7.6.1 added some support for certain drive sizes and 8.1 added HFS Plus.  It's possible maybe the OS will handle the IDE drive differently in a later version that could improve compatibility.

Otherwise, it sounds like you have covered all your bases pretty well.  Best of luck!

 

[IAmTheRoflcopter]

Yeah the adapter is set Master/Slave by default.

I'll give it a go but i'd like to keep the system running 7.5 as i have an external SCSI cd drive who's driver doesn't work beyond 7.5.3. But hey a working system is more important!

 

[rsolberg]

Does this IDE-CF adapter have more than one CF slot? I've not had luck with those on Macs that only support one hard drive on the IDE bus. I've not tried an adapter with a female connector on a Mac before. Usually those plug directly into the motherboard IDE connector on a PC. Perhaps the adapter and/or gender changer adapter are enough to create signalling issues, preventing the system from identifying a drive on the bus.

 

[360alaska]

I tried one in my Performa 640DOS and it would see it but not format it, The fact that it doesn't see makes me think you have your card CF card adapter set to slave.I think you should try this one: http://www.ebay.com/itm/CF-Card-Compact-Flash-Card-to-3-5-IDE-40-Pins-ATA-Converter-Adapter-Laptop-SSD-/171829250366?hash=item2801d2493e:g:NygAAOSwjVVVgcJ4

 

[IAmTheRoflcopter]

Thats something i haven't tried!

I bought one of these adapters: http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/351887260740?_trksid=p2060353.m2749.l2649&ssPageName=STRK%3AMEBIDX%3AITwhich has a master/slave jumper on it, could try swapping it around, will give it a go and report back....

 

[LazarusNine]

This is a real shot in the dark, but is your CF card labeled (or otherwise identified) as UDMA? From my experience (I have three of these setups in older Macs), the Mac can only ever see the card if it's a UDMA card. There's actually a decent resource for this over at LEM:

http://lowendmac.com/2015/the-lowdown-on-using-compactflash-to-replace-an-ide-hard-drive/

 

[IAmTheRoflcopter]

I did wonder about this, ive tried a few different CF cards (a couple of Sandisk Extremes and a Lexar one, i can't remember the model) i can't find any info on them saying whether they are UDMA or not but i think they are all more recent cards so would assume they are UDMA. I could be wrong though. You dont have a list of suitable cards or anything do you?