Greetings and welcome to an LGR thing,

and today, we've gotta have the talk.

The CompactFlash talk, that is.

This is not gonna be a comprehensive, "this is the one way to do it" type of video.

And I'm not gonna show every single option for CompactFlash, either.

But I do want to give an overview as far as how I'm gonna be doing it for

this lovely Woodgrain 486 build

that I put together last year here on LGR.

It's a great little workhouse machine... workhorse.

(laughs) Workhouse?

Whatever, man. It's a cool computer.

And I like it a lot but

recently the hard drive has gotten really, really loud,

and it's just too much to enjoy.

And that is actually one reason that I like

putting old hard disks in old computers like this.

It's part of that retro nostalgic experience for me.

It feels more authentic

to have a spinning platter in there making noise.

And, you know, the load times and stuff, it makes sense.

But there comes a point, too, where I'm using this one to

capture a lot of stuff,

like my Wing Commander review was

recorded entirely on here.

And I really wished that I had something more convenient

than having to rely on old floppy disks and stuff.

So, that's what we're gonna do today.

Let's take a look at some of the devices that I'm considering.

So when it comes to this CompactFlash stuff, you have several options.

This one seems to be one of the most popular ones by Syba here.

We got an IDE cable that goes right here,

power goes right here if you need it,

and then, of course, your CompactFlash card

will just sort of go in

right there like that, and it's a pretty simple solution.

It is internal, though.

In fact, most of these are gonna be internal.

So you're gonna have access to the inside of the case,

if you wanna swap out the cards.

But that's a thing.

There's also this one that plugs in directly

into the motherboard or

your floppy disk controller card, whatever.

And it does the same thing,

it's just not, you know, not on this little board here

and you don't plug in a cable to it.

This goes in directly.

It is worth noting, though, that these are only gonna work with certain computers

with a certain BIOS that is supportive of these.

And unfortunately, there's no directory saying

which one's gonna work for you and which one won't.

These are the ones that seem to be recommended to me for the most part

by people that say they work well on 386 and 486.

There's also this one here for laptops.

I just picked this up on a whim 'cause I was curious.

Just goes right in here on a 2½-inch IDE tray.

And of course, there's also just the matter of the cards themselves.

Not all CompactFlash cards are gonna be created equally,

as you might imagine. They've been around for a long time.

I've heard that these older ones, like the 64 meg one here

are not gonna be quite as reliable

just over, you know, long term usage.

So I ended up going with one of these

4 gig cards, although I'm only gonna be able to use

2 gigs per partition on this DOS setup,

due to the way

that the drive sizes are handled.

in DOS.

There's something else just to keep in mind in general,

and that is the reason that these devices work

so easily and why they're so popular

with machine setups like this is because

CompactFlash actually uses the parallel ATA standard.

So these are just basically miniature ATA devices.

These adapters are just converting the interface of CompactFlash

over to IDE.

And that's why there's so little going on here.

Pretty much, it's just adding this stuff for power

and a couple of indicators and whatnot.

The newer CompactFlash cards, like CompactFast, like CFast,

won't work at all. Those use serial ATAs as standard.

Or at least they won't work on these old computers.

They have more modern uses.

There's also these industrial solid-state

flash memory solutions, they're disk-on-modules,

as they're called.

And this one's 128 megs. They come in different sizes, as you can see.

But yeah, these are good if you want to do

a straight-up hard drive replacement.

These go directly into the IDE interface, a lot like this other one does.

But of course, this isn't swappable, and I can't just easily

plug this into a modern computer

So for my purposes, I wanted something

that I could easily transfer and swap back and forth.

I ended up grabbing this thing,

which is really just the same as this other one over here.

Except it has a bracket on the back,

so it adds a little port on the back of my computer,

and this way I can sort of swap the cards

and get access to them easily with the case closed.

And then take it over to my modern machine, put files on it, you know.

It's more convenient, is what I'm trying to say.

At least for my purposes. So, yeah, let's go ahead and install this thing.

(soft jazz music)

Alright, so the old hard drive is right in here, so...

Oh, jeez.

Okay, yeah. So, don't need that anymore.

However, we will need this

to plug into the card interface itself.

And, yeah..

There's the IDE which we'll use...

uh...

to connect to it, maybe?

I'm not sure if that's long enough.

It might be long enough.

I'm planning to put the...

I'm planning to put this right in here.

So...

That's like just too short.

Hmm...

Well, I might just get a longer cable later.

In fact, I'm just gonna leave it out here to test it

and not actually put all the mounting stuff in there.

Got the four-pin...

This is normally a floppy drive

cable there, for like 3½-inch

drives, but it works well for this.

'Cause it takes 5 volts, which is what that provides.

And this is the card that I'm gonna be

using.

And it just...

goes in there like that.

Simple enough. And then, of course, when I don't need it in here anymore,

this is gonna be sticking out the back, so it's gonna be easily accessible.

And then I can just take this over to the modern computer and

transfer my files.

And then put it right back in there, so...

Yeah, let's turn on the computer and see how this works,

just sorta hanging out the side here.

Alright, so everything is plugged in and ready to go.

I'm gonna go ahead and power it on here

and see if things are gonna show up.

(slight buzzing)

We have a video signal. That's a good sign.

(drive whirring)

(PC beeps)

Okay, so it said "Transcend" there, and of course, this is not gonna do anything because

it can't even read

probably the disk format that's on there at the moment, so

I'm gonna use a DOS boot disk here that I have

loaded with some tools.

Yeah, so we put in "C:" Obviously it's not going to "see" anything

because the drive is not formatted or it's not

ready for DOS.

And in fact, we don't even know

what's been done this. I just got that card off of eBay.

So I'm gonna run this program here that I've read does good things.

It's called "Clear HDD."

And so with this, it's supposed to just sort of wipe the whole thing clean,

and sort of prep it so that we will be able to do things like

place an MS-DOS partition,

add a master boot record, format it, that kind of thing.

And here we are so... yeah.

At this point, I would pretty much just have to run fdisk,

and see what we can see.

Okay, well it at least sees there's a fixed drive.

No partitions are defined, so we are going to define

the primary DOS partition, which is this one.

And it'll restart and do its thing.

Hopefully, we should at least

have what it sees as a C: drive after this.

Okay, so we can see that there is a C: there, which is good,

but there's nothing on it yet, so what we're going to do is

format C: with sarcasm.

(chuckles) Actually, "/s," that means to

add the system files which...

I don't necessarily need to do that, I just want to.

Because I... feel like it.

And there we have the instantaneous

benefits of CompactFlash.

This is formatting so quickly compared to a standard hard disk drive.

And, yes, it's going to be 2 gigs because that is the maximum partition size.

If I were thinking, I would have added another partition just for the lulz.

But I didn't, so whatever.

Cool. That /s added the COMMAND.COM there

which means we should just be able to boot

straight to

the CompactFlash card now

without the disk drive at all.

Yup.

(chuckles)

So, yeah, it's having us put in the time and day

like some really old school DOS, but...

Well at this point, really the thing to do is install MS-DOS,

which is gonna be the

full operating system that I want to run on here.

And, yes, I am going to do this from disk.

There's other ways that you could do it.

I could in theory take this CompactFlash card and...

you know, copy the files over to the cart itself

and just skip the disk drives entirely, but...

There's some weirdness there

with the disk identifications.

So, Disk 1, 2 and 3 are ID'd by the setup program.

And I've run into some funkiness trying to copy them over

into a directory as opposed to installing from a floppy disk.

It's just easier to do this. There's no...

I don't know.

I like it this way anyway.

I like to hear disk sounds, man.

So, yeah, we're gonna continue and replace the current version of DOS

because we don't need that!

So, yeah, that copying that system file really was redundant.

So, whatever.

And this is just gonna copy pretty much the same normal speed as...

anything else. It's three disks.

So we're gonna skip ahead to the end.

(whistling ala Duke Nukem)

(PC beeps)

Yay!

We are finished, so...

Time to restart

and hope that it loads.

HIMEM takes longer to do than anything else.

Uh, awesome!

Okay! Well here's the really fun part.

I get to test out the functionality with this

as a card going into the modern computer,

and then transferring some stuff back over,

like, no problem, so let's do that.

So, alright. I'm going to stick the

thing into my thing here.

It's really descriptive.

And hopefully it should pop up... it does!

(laughs)

So, yeah, we've got, you know, here's the DOS things.

And so I can just copy files over quite regularly.

I'm gonna copy over Commander Keen: Goodbye, Galaxy,

Jazz Jackrabbit, the CD version, and

Tyrian 2000.

And, yeah. (laughs softly)

Very quick, which is awesome.

And I'm gonna stick these in a nice, handy little "Games" folder.