Re: Preparation of CompactFlash card

[Sven Utcke <utcke@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hello Jack,

> and then peeled the top metal cover off of my "Type II" PCCARD
> adapter to reduce its thickness down to "Type I" (just slides out
> with the "Eject" lever now)

Nice idea.  Maybe I should follow your lead.

> Then I realized what I hadn't thought of.  Although the card had
> been partitioned (SDISK) and flash-formatted (SFORMAT), I hadn't
> used the higher level DOS FORMAT after that.

Well, you aren't supposed to need to format (especially as a _real_
format doesn't exactly increase the drives life expectancy).  However,
it's nice to see that formating does seem to help with modern
Windows (and maybe Linux too?).

> CHKDSK is happy.  I still get the
> 
> **************************
> * Invalid PCMCIA card B: *
> **************************
> 
> Message during a reboot, 

Sure, as the pc3k sees the drive before the drivers have been loaded
:-)

> and of course the built in "File manager" has no idea what to do
> with the B: drive, so it just leaves it out of the drive list.

I thought that once the drivers are loaded this works just fine (but I
normally use the Volkov Commander, a Norton Commander clone, which can
do nearly the same but is a lot smaller --- and I use the beta, which
has the advantage to be still smaller and free, but of course the
disadvantage that some functionality is missing...).

> I've read of other software that can be used on the mailing list in
> its place, but I always use the DOS prompt anyway.

If, like me, you are a unix-person at heart I can only recomment
toddy, which can be configured to work nearly exactly like the tcsh,
including file- (and directory-) name completion...

> I can't believe that I was forgetting to follow the SDISK and
> SFORMAT with the DOS FORMAT, but I was.  I just thought I'd mention
> my embarrassing tale in case another newbie comes along.  Just to
> save them from the time that I wasted.

Well, as I said, at least for use in the Sharp itself format isn't
needed...

Sven
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