CF on a Vulcan

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CF on a Vulcan

There has been a bit of discussion on some sites about using a compact flash with an ide adapter to connect to a Vulcan hard drive controller. While looking through some stuff, I discovered I had a 16mb CF. Connected it via adapter to a IIgs Vulcan controller. Formatted alright with the AE Partition Manager and showed up on the IIgs desktop. So I copied the hard drive over and proceeded to boot off the Vulcan controller.
Connected it to a IIe Vulcan controller and copied my IIe hard drive over and booted off it. Ran it for a while, booted a few apps and everything seemed to be going well.
I called a couple of friends that had older cameras that had would’ve come with small CF cards and asked for a loan. Some weren’t recognized at all. Some showed up in the partition manager but I couldn’t save the partition table. Tried pre-formatting with my ramfast using a CF - SCSI adapter but that didn’t help
Still if anyone has a Vulcan controller with a dead or no drive this may be an option for them. The CF that worked is a Nikon EC-16CF made by sandisk. A bit small for a IIgs but not a bad size for a IIe

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Re: CF on a Vulcan

Wayne,

If you go up to Rich's CFFA site, one of the things it specifically says is that the CF card that is the best to use is SanDisk. He has a chart there of different CF disks he tried and the results.

Steven Smile

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Re: CF on a Vulcan

It’s a little different with the Vulcan controller. There were only a few hard drives that people found to work with the Vulcan controller. If I recall correctly about the only CFs that anyone has had any luck with are a small handful, all under 20mb. Someone mentioned trying a 16mb Sandisk without any luck. The major reason I mentioned this one is that it’s got a part number and possibly all of them were made at about the same time for Nikon. So maybe they didn’t improve it during production.
I’ll keep looking and hopefully I’ll run into some more CFs to try.

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Re: CF on a Vulcan

It´s rather more related to the kind of way the CF is handled by the driver than the factory that made it....
There still is the restriction at the Vulcan to limit the supported Drive and partitions by the
contents of the controller Eprom and the Software of the Vulcan.

It seems the vulcan only supports up to 4 Heads and 1024 cylinders and the adapter connecting the CF card for use at the Vulcan shall not exceed this bounderies - so at the old drives only there are structures supported up to 16 sectors limiting a harddrive to max. approx. 40 MB and the newer ROM for IIGS ( Vulcan Gold ) only up to max. 64 Sectors, giving a limit to 120 MB. So If a CF is formatted at an SCSI it must be prepared to stay in this limits while partitioning and lowlevel formatting... if it then is taken back to the Vulcan controller and the parameters have not been exceeded, then the controller software of the vulcan is able to repartition it and treat it well....
speedyG

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Re: CF on a Vulcan

Found a couple of Sandisk 32mb CFs that’ll work on the IIe or IIgs with the 40mb ROM. Also found a couple of Lexar 64mb CFs that work with the Vulcan Gold ROM on the IIgs. Counting the 16mb, that brings me up to 5 CFs that’ll work with Vulcan cards. They’re all a lot faster than the hard drives I have, especially the WD ones which are pretty pathetic. Not as noticeable on a IIe though.

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