Can anyone confirm what USB drives are compatible? Don't laugh, just getting back into the hobby and don't have anything suitable on hand so I need to order.

I see now 2GB or less Sandisk USB drives are now uncommon and don't really see anything reputable and low capacity on Amazon.

How fussy is this device? Would a modern Sandisk 32GB or so USB thumb drive work? Does it really need 2GB or 512MB drives? Models known to work or not? Will it need special initialization/fdisk setup on the Pocket 386?

Also, the included CF card is probably sketchy, right? Back with the HP200LX everyone used to use the SDCFB from Sandisk. Those are now rare/expensive. Is there a newer Sandisk card this can use which has high IOPS?

Yes, I know other brands of flash media exist. I have a strong loyalty to Sandisk and would be very hesitant to consider alternatives, even from popular brands like PNY or Kingston.

The included CF card in mine at least is a 2GB Western Digital SiliconDrive, which I’m sure was pulled from something going by how grimy it is.

I can’t speak for the USB drives as I haven’t used it yet, but I’d guess any FAT/MBR formatted drive is likely to work.

Hm. As far as MS-DOS 6 and CF cards are concerned, I'd say 512 MB and lower for CHS addressing, 2 GB to 8 GB for LBA (XTIDE Universal BIOS).

radiounix wrote on 2024-04-26, 17:19:

Can anyone confirm what USB drives are compatible? Don't laugh, just getting back into the hobby and don't have anything suitab […]
Show full quote

Can anyone confirm what USB drives are compatible? Don't laugh, just getting back into the hobby and don't have anything suitable on hand so I need to order.

I see now 2GB or less Sandisk USB drives are now uncommon and don't really see anything reputable and low capacity on Amazon.

How fussy is this device? Would a modern Sandisk 32GB or so USB thumb drive work? Does it really need 2GB or 512MB drives? Models known to work or not? Will it need special initialization/fdisk setup on the Pocket 386?

Also, the included CF card is probably sketchy, right? Back with the HP200LX everyone used to use the SDCFB from Sandisk. Those are now rare/expensive. Is there a newer Sandisk card this can use which has high IOPS?

Yes, I know other brands of flash media exist. I have a strong loyalty to Sandisk and would be very hesitant to consider alternatives, even from popular brands like PNY or Kingston.

I tried a 16GB USB drive, it hung up for 10 mins or so thrashing it, then it mounted, but it appeared empty with a capacity of 130MB... which I think is also what Win95 does when you put in a 20GB or so HDD. I believe then that, you either want to keep it to 2GB or smaller drive with one partition, or 8GB or smaller with multiple partitions no bigger than 2GB, but it's unknown if the driver will mount more than the first partition.

kemurphy wrote on 2024-04-26, 12:55:

Anyone know why NT 3.51 might have a hard time booting on this thing? It's not the low RAM -- I have it booting with 8MB in VirtualBox. On the Pocket386 it hangs after changing text resolution during "OS Loader v3.51........." but before the blue boot screen, with the text cut off at the top. Chipset issue?

hard to tell, may need someone having a m6117d based board to test booting NT 3.51 on it for comparison.

BitWrangler wrote on 2024-04-28, 23:13:

radiounix wrote on 2024-04-26, 17:19:

Can anyone confirm what USB drives are compatible? Don't laugh, just getting back into the hobby and don't have anything suitab […]
Show full quote

Can anyone confirm what USB drives are compatible? Don't laugh, just getting back into the hobby and don't have anything suitable on hand so I need to order.

I see now 2GB or less Sandisk USB drives are now uncommon and don't really see anything reputable and low capacity on Amazon.

How fussy is this device? Would a modern Sandisk 32GB or so USB thumb drive work? Does it really need 2GB or 512MB drives? Models known to work or not? Will it need special initialization/fdisk setup on the Pocket 386?

Also, the included CF card is probably sketchy, right? Back with the HP200LX everyone used to use the SDCFB from Sandisk. Those are now rare/expensive. Is there a newer Sandisk card this can use which has high IOPS?

Yes, I know other brands of flash media exist. I have a strong loyalty to Sandisk and would be very hesitant to consider alternatives, even from popular brands like PNY or Kingston.

I tried a 16GB USB drive, it hung up for 10 mins or so thrashing it, then it mounted, but it appeared empty with a capacity of 130MB... which I think is also what Win95 does when you put in a 20GB or so HDD. I believe then that, you either want to keep it to 2GB or smaller drive with one partition, or 8GB or smaller with multiple partitions no bigger than 2GB, but it's unknown if the driver will mount more than the first partition.

Mine worked fine with an old 8GB Geeksquad USB Stick I've had for a while. You just have to be careful about doing dir commands. The first time, it immediately knew that 6GB was free, but when I ran a couple games and typed "dir" again, it sat for a couple minutes trying to work out how much free space there was. I could have just reset the unit, but I decided to wait, and it ended up taking 2-3 minutes to be responsive again.

edit: Sorry, was having a bad day!

I've been having a bit of a horrible week really with getting any time on mine, things kept coming up and kept me away from playing. Then the pollen has been getting to me, and every slight complication gave me an instant sinus headache. I have been fighting various systems, compact flash adapters and cards all week. I have two USB CF adapters that are differently weird, and are both a little worn, not least because both seem to need ejecting/unplugging to recognise a different card. I also don't have what would seem to be a "goldilocks" system for preparing the cards on, which would be a PIII or so with USB 2.0, floppy and free PATA channel, and networked. So rather hilarious fight with a few different systems finding they only like one USB CF reader at once when booted into an OS that lets me do low level stuff. Then there's all the UEFI stupidity and formatting the boot sectors wrong for old BIOS/FAT. I guess it might have been simpler if I had some cards functionally identical to the 2GB one supplied and could just clone 1:1 then delete what I don't want, but I only had a small selection. One lexar and some 512 "industrial" cheapies.

So I was doing all sorts of messing around with stuff that seemed like it was the right thing to resize the images, but kept ending up with 512 MB partitions still on a 2GB image, and couldn't break out of that mess. Then I was stuck in a rut of converting one image format to another to try to do one thing with one tool and another thing with another... yeah that didn't really go anywhere either.

Anyway, I ended up finding out that the Aspire One in pics could be booted off either CF reader, and still see the other, and then I got the lexar formatted and bootable, and xcopied a bunch across.... it sort of works but I got a Win95 Vfat error, IDK if it's because the lexar doesn't have 32bit mode so the win95 disk drivers are set up wrong, or whether it's one of those fusterclucks with block alignment or something. Anyhoo, I didn't know whether the cheap industrials were better, but they seemed a lot faster than the lexar, so did a straight rufus image off the lexar and back onto the industrial and that didn't seem to improve things. IDK if I should try a win95 reinstall or not. Win95 is the main reason I wanted not to be running off the supplied CF, because in my experience crashes can mangle a much less finicky spindle drive and take a lot of sorting out, and scandisk etc doesn't seem to work half so well on flash, and can make it fail to read anything at all, brick it. So yeah didn't wanna trust 95 on a one and only CF. But anyhoo... got a sorta working boot card now and some of my own stuff on it for messing around... I might have to spend actual money on a 32bit capable, decently fast 2GB to direct clone the original.

So not really done much.. heh, one directory I just shovelled onto one of my cards happened to have Terminal Velocity demo on, it gets about 2fps with everything set to minimum 🤣

Sunoo wrote on 2024-04-26, 17:26:

The included CF card in mine at least is a 2GB Western Digital SiliconDrive, which I’m sure was pulled from something going by how grimy it is.

I actually thought mine was new looking at first, then I realised that the label was supposed to be white, not some a fancy marbled background, yeah, it's grubby.

I'd just buy a real WD Silicon Drive then. Same as OEM for the machine, people's reports here were really useful. They're readily available as used pulls on EBay for pretty cheap as they are pretty modern and coming out of scrapped surplus equipment en masse. Pretty sure WD bought Sandisk, and pretty recently too; these should be modern, well performing, and industrial in more than name only, i.e specced in quality western-brand embedded computing products as a solid state hard disk.

I bought one. $7 shipped. Was afraid I'd have your experience if I tried to use anything random. I already mentioned this, but back in the day Sundisk/Sandisk was the CF boot drive of choice with Taiwanese options like Transcend being an iffier second pick. Sandisk pioneered the CF format in the early 90s and early pre Ultra cards had a reputation for being highly compliant/working in marginally compatible, early CF equipment. Palmtops used them as a factory storage device much like the Pocket 386. Even if a drive proves compatible, it might have poor resilience in a high read/write environment like Windows 95 and might exhibit random stutters and terrible small file read write throughput that makes a system painful to use.

I found a cheap 2GB USB 2.0 thumb drive on Amazon. Let's hope that works okay. Vintage USB drives are shockingly thin on the ground compared to CF. A second CF slot for data exchange would be much preferable to a CH375, IMHO. Better, cheaper options.

If you want the original disk image, reach out to the seller. They can provide one. There's also a DOS 6.22 image posted. Search for ZHblue on Github. They're a friend of the Pocket 386 developer.

Honest thought is that Win 3.11 might be safer for CF. Fewer random writes, less disk activity. Swap off, 8MB is enough for most applications and a 386SX isn't for programs like Netscape 4.0 or Photoshop that would want more than 8MB. In truth, 1/2MB of RAM and 40-100MB of hard disk space would be about right for a 386SX back in the day, especially as the SX40 was a marginal budget option sold at swap meets and out of computer magazine back pages as a cheap 286/386 upgrade or means to cobble together a computer out of scraps. Seems like most come from Eastern Europe and Russia where hard economic realities made it a popular option, likely running with the slowest 8 bit plain VGA or even Hercules, just 1 or 2MB of RAM, a tiny or even no hard disk, maybe explaining why DOS lived on longer there than in the west. These were sold well into 1995, at which point Windows 95 was on the horizon and a 486 DX/2 with VESA local bus was an entry level computer minimum with 486SX and 386 machines sold as closeout bargains.

Mine just came in the mail. Quality is far better than expected. The LCD is indeed IPS and looks pretty good. Fit and finish in general is pretty good, and the keyboard is small but has a better feel than some brand name laptops of past. A serial port is now included, at least if you buy it direct from the seller.

Performance is much better than a classic 386sx running some tasks because of the much better disk i/o and super fast VGA chipset. It's actually pretty usable running the Windows 95 interface and feels more like a 486SX running it.

Also got mine today. Pretty nice, but what really bothers me is that it (mine at least) loses CMOS settings randomly and very frequently...

This is extremely annoying, since in the default bios settings the floppy drive is enabled (which leads to three loud beeps at boot) and the mouse support is set to disabled.

I have read about the horrific RTC implementation on this device, so I might not be the only one experiencing this problem.

I don't really care about the time and date settings, so as a temporary work-around, I have modified the bios to set the floppy to disabled and mouse support to enabled by default (with AMIBCP Ver. 6.24).

Maybe someone can make use of this. Use at your own risk. I don't know, which tool is appropriate for flashing, I ended up taking the chip out and using a programmer, so again, please be careful.

Yes I was pleasantly surprised by the screen and keyboard feel, though the arrow keys are a bit fiddly, not sure if there was an original design choice made for this machine or whether it was an available keyboard that best fit.

USB shenanigans, so after going through a few 15min timeouts where it wouldn't read various sticks, some I thought were good, I studied this post..
https://forum.vcfed.org/index.php?threads/poc … 0/#post-1380520
Aha, well guess I haven't been doing that, so will try to confirm all that info.

Was all evening yesterday fighting compact flash stupidity again, I thought I had a better way to prep a card, and nope, I think my USB to HDD adapter is trash, thought I might get on better with a HDD adapter, with 2.5 to CF adapter, but nope, though I think it's that particular piece is failing, which is a good news bad news thing, it means that a different drive I thought was dead might actually work, coz it wasn't behaving on that piece of crap.

BTW I think that mention of game incompatibility with emm386 etc mentioned in linked post is a thing that happens on any hardware. Yer genuine retro, need a multiboot config for different games, experience.

Disk Genius looks potentially useful for messing around with images, I failed with it last night due I think to adapter crapping out, but in theory it seems to do useful things.

I am beginning to think the "hard way" of setting up a machine on the bench with secondary PATA free and working on that would have actually been the easy way for CF prep given all the hassles these adapters are giving me... even if it was a 486 board and I had to transfer everything with floppy 🤣

Just seen post above, yes I have read about RTC problems but I haven't really dug into it yet on mine. I am wondering if the 32khz crystals are going in bad due to soldering method, they can be delicate.

I don't have one, but I'd suspect formatting smaller partitions on larger drives - as long as the drive is picked up OK - should work with reasonable speed and is worth trying IMO.

'Taking forever to run a dir command with lots of free space' is a thing that's been seen on real hardware before.

Disk caching REALLY helps with that.

One thing to consider, if the driver for USB sticks wants raw formatted, would be to format the rsw block device (and not a partition) with linux.

I might do that and upload it as a zip for testing.

Another might be getting a slow, low profile usb stick. HP made some years ago that were all metal encased, and very short.

there are similar devices on amazon in no-name, dubious brands but you get the idea. Something small enough and low enough profile to just 'leave in' the port.

BitWrangler wrote on 2024-04-30, 15:15:

Disk Genius looks potentially useful for messing around with images, I failed with it last night due I think to adapter crapping out, but in theory it seems to do useful things.

DiskGenius is very useful and it's the default choice for partitioning tools in the Chinese enthusiasts.
My own workflow for preparing CF cards uses VirtualBox, DiskGenius and Symantec Ghost/Ghost32.
===================
- Prepare a WinXP virtual machine in VirtualBox as a tool to move the GHO image.
- Install a DOS virtual machine as "master tape" in VirtualBox and install all software for CF card.
- Shut down the DOS virtual machine and mount its virtual hdd (VDI file) on the WinXP virtual machine.
- Make an GHO image of DOS hdd under WinXP using Ghost32.
- Transfer the GHO to the host system(my machine is Win10) using the shared folder feature of VirtualBox Tools
- Write the GHO image to CF card using a USB card reader and Ghost32
- If you encounter a situation CF card can't boot, use DiskGenius to create MBR partition table on the CF card, then create the primary partition, and set the primary partition activate
- Then use Ghost to perform partition-to-partition cloning
=================
Symantec Ghost clones FAT partitions on a file-by-file basis, so the partition sizes do not need to match, as long as the partition is larger than the capacity occupied by the files in the image.

Very cool. I love the form factor, similar vibe to a libretto. The models so far haven't really been fast enough for the games and programs I like to use so I'm chilling out and waiting to see if an even more enhanced version may come out in the future as I think it would just end up living on the shelf if I bought one right now. A 486 or better cpu would be nice 😉

wierd_w wrote on 2024-04-30, 17:15:

'Taking forever to run a dir command with lots of free space' is a thing that's been seen on real hardware before. […]
Show full quote

'Taking forever to run a dir command with lots of free space' is a thing that's been seen on real hardware before.

Disk caching REALLY helps with that.

One thing to consider, if the driver for USB sticks wants raw formatted, would be to format the rsw block device (and not a partition) with linux.

I might do that and upload it as a zip for testing.

Another might be getting a slow, low profile usb stick. HP made some years ago that were all metal encased, and very short.

there are similar devices on amazon in no-name, dubious brands but you get the idea. Something small enough and low enough profile to just 'leave in' the port.

FREESP will do it but there is potential for it to get out of sync. I personally haven't had an issue with it when using larger CF on very slow machines/emulation.

https://www.genesis8bit.fr/archives/index.php?news_id=2139

Formatting a 16GB (USB -ed) drive with a 512MB partition worked fine. Momentary lag on initial directory list, but that's about it.

I don't want to be "that person" but formatting things as 2GB partitions or smaller (although 512MB is ideal) has always been the case and people had said this was the case both earlier in this thread and in the book 8088 one as well. The instructions also say this as well as those ISA XT-IDE/USB/CF adapters also indicate this. It has nothing to do with the USB drive itself.
If for whatever reason its still giving you trouble, I suggest watching this video as there are ways to deal with this problem. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rg81DCacDqg OR just format the drive as FAT16 in Linux. (I know its for the XT-IDE card he's showing off in the video but it still absolutely applies.)
Truthfully the only thing you really have to avoid is allowing modern windows to partition it and by "modern windows" I mean vista to 11. Both diskpart and disk management as well as the right-click format option in My Computer/This PC seems to jank something up. Any ol' DOS-based windows install, the older Windows NTs, etc all seem to do just fine. If I were to guess they probably broke something a long time ago but since most people only use the FAT16 (or just 'fat') FS option nowadays for old devices (digital cameras, camcorders, old phones/audio players, etc) I suspect it never got noticed and since its only relevant to old hardware (since everything supports fat32 instead and can often format itself) it'll also never be fixed.

tl;dr the 512MB-2GB partition thing was and has always been extremely well known and you would have to intentionally not be reading the trillions of posts that came before these ones to not know this. It's just... well, 'how it be' for lack of better term. Common knowledge. You can also just use virtualbox but I find it takes more effort.

(that said, i have also had success in copying or using an image file of an HDD from that era and simply increasing or decreasing the size of the partition as i feel fit via rufus + diskpart)

It comes from the DOS limitations on partition size for FAT16, which is 2gb.

In addition to that, there is the baseline CHS limit, at 504 mb. Normally only seen on some really old 386s and older.

Then there is the modified CHS limit at 8gb, Higher than this, DOS cannot address the sectors since it cant count that high. (you need an LBA aware OS, like win9x's fake dos 7, or FreeDos)

After that, you have the LBA24 limitation, at 128gb, where you need an LBA48 aware OS or handler present. (IIRC, XTIDE XUB is LBA48?)

You are quite correct that these limits are well known, and there are solutions(tm) to all of them. The best one is a bios int13 handler, like XTIDE, or a 32bit flat mode disk controller driver (for linux, win9x, NT, and pals.) For DOS, you need the int13 handler. (EIther XTIDE or a DDO. Traditional antique software, is the DDO route.)

I was referring more to the "What happens when you have an ECHS capable, but very very old machine, that tries to get a directory listing on a large (2gb) volume" issue. EG, it sits there with the activity light on, and appears to be locked up, when in fact, it is just VEEERRRY SLOOOWWLY parsing, reparsing, and re-reparsing the FAT table, which is very large, and the controller is very slow.

This problem is rectified by the use of a disk caching solution, which holds a copy of the FAT in RAM, and prevents the controller or disk being in any way involved after the first full read of the FAT. The directory listing then proceeds at a "More reasonable" speed.