Oops, microdrives ...
When is a microdrive not an IDE/CF compatible card? When it's a Seagate ST1 (5G) with firmware 3.08 or later. Apparently these microdrives are specifically meant for use in MP3 players and some of the stuff like a partition table is not there. :-< So I now have 4 microdrives that can't be used as a hard drive in an embedded system. I guess I should have done a bit more research before I purchased these off EBay. Oh well live and learn.
posted by Neil Cherry @ 2:24 PM
3 comments
3 Comments:
Is the interface compatible with IDE? I mean, are the signals the same?
Partition tables are "software". It should be hardware independent. Although you might need to re-create the partition table with cfdisk.
Sorry Peter, I didn't fully explain. The microdrives I have all have the same problem. Linux sees them but can't read sector 0 (error) and no partition table. That was from dmesg. When I went up online the information is that the microdrives with 3.04 firmware (or later) or drive labeled "embedded devices only" (not sure which) have something disabled in the firmware to keep it from being used as a IDE drive.
I just ran into this same problem trying to build a micro web server with a Nano-ITX board. BIOS shows the disk, and I can access it fine if its in a USB CF reader, but installing Ubuntu Server on it using the board's built-in CF slot (Jetway J8F9) yields "no disk found" errors. I was thinking maybe I got a bad drive. I guess in a way I did... *sigh* Oh well. I have an old Hitachi 4 gig microdrive in another box I will have to scavenge. Thanks for the info!
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