On Sat, Aug 16, 2003 at 03:35:37PM -0400, der Mouse wrote:
> > Find an ide to compact flash adapter.  They're around and cost
> > $10-30.  Compact flash's regular interface is very close,
> > (identical?), to IDE to begin with so the "adapter" is really just
> > traces on a board and a couple of connectors.
> 
> > Once you plug it in, it looks like a disk drive to the bios and to
> > netbsd.  From there, you just load it as you would a regular disk
> > drive.
> 
> That's been my experience.  I've never tried booting off one, but I did
> once end up with a cheap digital camera that wrote its pictures to CF.
> I found a website (something that looked authoritative, a name along
> the lines of compactflash.org) that said the interface was electrically
> identical to IDE-on-PCMCIA.  I got an adapter (which was cheap, not

"Not exactly".

Connect up one set of wires, and it acts like an IDE controller on a PCMCIA
bus with one drive connected to it.  Connect up another, and it just acts
like an IDE drive (so you plug it into your existing IDE controller).

Every CompactFlash device is required to implement both modes, and though
once upon a time "drive mode" was buggy in some vendors' devices, that is
now largely a thing of the past.