On 2008-03-29, Douglas A. Tutty <dtutty@porchlight.ca> wrote:
quoted text
>
> I have my old IBM ValuePoint 486 that has a bios that really only likes
> drives under 512 MB.  It has worked with one 8 GB drive, but not another
> seemingly identical WD 8 GB drive, yet alone a new-off-the-shelf 80 GB
> PATA drive.  The IBM bios has no adjustability (as does the Award bios),
> but instead just displays the size of the hard drive found.  If it
> displays a size, it will boot from it, if not, it declares a hardware
> error and won't boot from anything.
>
> I wonder if a 512 MB CF card in a PATA-CF adapter would be a solution in
> this case.  The box would likely do remote-logging anyway.
>
> Does a CF card in a PATA-CF adapter look just like a HD, bootable and
> all, to old BIOS?

Yes, totally. I think this has a fairly good chance of success.

Only thing I've found that refuses to boot from CF in a converter so
far is my X40 (if anyone has any tips on that, please send them my way :-)