Two steps for a man, one giant leap for retro kind

I cleared two hurdles today that have been frustrating me for a few weeks.

1) I finally have the 6100 booting off solid state media, in this case a Compact Flash card. Originally I tried a SCSI to IDE adapter and combined that with an IDE to Compact Flash adapter and inside that I had a Compact Flash card that is actually an SD adapter. (one is pictured here.)

I guess that was just too many adaptations and it didn't work. I couldn't get the IDE/Compact Flash and Compact Flash/SD adapter to work in Windows or Mac OS X either (although DOS could see it). Had this worked I probably would have pushed it even further and gone for a microSD card inside an SD adapter. Booting off something the size of an eraser head through 4 layers of adaptation would have been cool.

I tried a Compact Flash Microdrive and that didn't work - it wouldn't boot at all - it turns out the voltages were wrong. Nicer IDE to CF adapters have jumpers allowing you to choose the voltage of your microdrive - however, the adapter that I have does not. They were 3 for $10 off eBay, so if you need Microdrive support - go with a better adapter.

So then I ordered an IDE to SD adapter.

That didn't work either. Mac OS X didn't like that one either.

So then I ordered a regular 4 gig Compact Flash card and that worked fine. I formatted it and it boots fine.

Why didn't I do that from the beginning you ask? Becuase I had a few extra SD cards of various capacities around (my PDA, camera, voice recorder and digisette MP3 player all use MMC and/or SD) and I wanted to use one of those instead.

The speed is nothing to write home about. The 5mb/sec SCSI bus of the 6100 - combined with 2 layers of adaptation, is fairly slow. Booting takes a little longer than with the hard drive. But hey - it's solid state! No moving parts, no hard drive noise! Yea baby!

2) Caller ID is finally working! My 6100mc isn't just a media center - it's a call center too. It uses a Geoport telecom adpater AND a modem. More info on this wackiness tomorrow, the final day of the retrochallenge.