[Coco] 2gig CF card killed

[Roger Taylor]

Well, I think I've successfully killed a nice Lexar 2gig CF card 
after many attempts of installing Windows 98SE on it to run on my 
Compaq IA-1 internet appliance.

The IA-1 was hacked through software by replacing the internal 16mb 
sandisk (originally stocked with MSN Companion, a browser system) 
with Midori Linux.
Since the unit can also boot from the CF slot, a FAT-16 formatted 
card made bootable and with MS-DOS system files would boot into 
MS-DOS, and if Windows 98 was installed on the FAT-16 card, it would 
boot as well.

I was trying different install methods, first putting the Win98SE CD 
contents on the MS-DOS bootable CF card, then running setup.exe from 
the DOS prompt on the IA-1.  This worked perfect up until it kept 
locking up far into the install when the plug and play detection was 
happening.  Then I installed WIndows on the CF from my PC with the CF 
card connected as IDE drive 0, primary, using an IDE to CF 
adaptor.  This worked great and Windows and the PC both thought it 
was a real drive.

I did so many installs and formats, that I think I reached the 
~300,000 erase/write limit of the card.

My question is, with the IDE interfaces in use and people using CF 
cards as their main CoCo HD, how long would you expect the card to 
make it as a hard drive knowing that the cards were designed with a 
limited number of writes possible, and also when the card reaches 
this point, is it readable-only then?  Mine can't even be accessed now.

It seems to me that more and more people are trying to use CF cards 
as hard drive solutions for embedded systems and even for their 
computers.  This has got to be the business to get into?  :)  Think 
about it, they've designed a card that really shouldn't be any 
different than a memory stick in what they do (store memory and read 
it), but for some reason the CF's have a dying day somewhere in the 
future, sooner or later, depending on your use.  They know very well 
that people are trying to use them as hard drives on various systems, 
and that unless it's an embedded solution like Windows has done with 
a version of CE to limit the # of commits to the card, it's a dead 
card the day you buy it.  I don't think they're worth messing with.