No luck getting flash disk to work in 95lx

[Harald]

As the title already says, I am trying to get a flash disk to work in my 95lx. I have either a 10MB PCMCIA flash disk (SanDisk) or an 8MB compact flash card (also SanDisk) with a PCMCIA adapter available.
Unfortunately I can get neither of them to work in the 95lx (both of them work fine in my laptop). I have downloaded sundrv.zip from here, copied all the files to the 95lx using hyper terminal and started sinstall.bat from the dos shell. That copied the files hp95sdp.sys, sdisk.exe and sformat.exe to drive c: and also added config.sys containing "device=c:\hp95sdp.sys".
I then restarted to 95lx (alt + ctrl + del). However I still don't have a drive a:. Runing sdisk.exe returns "drive not ready" in case of the compact flash card and "write protected" in case of the flash disk.
One thing that is confusing me is, that there wasn't a config.sys before I started. So I am not sure if I need to make sure the system actually uses it somehow. (It's been quite a while since I last used dos, so I can't seem to remember...)

I know when the 95lx wasn't designed for flash memory cards, as they were not available then. However I found this document which suggests it should be possible to them. Did anyone get this to work?

Cheers,
Harald

[Katie Wasserman]

Read the section on flash cards here. You don't have to have a config.sys, but will probably want to have it with a few things in there like:

FILES=20

BUFFERS=5

DEVICE=(whatever flash driver you end up using)

[Harald]

Hi Katie,

I already found that. But I am still not sure what I am doing wrong. The way I understood this is, that only SanDisk compact cards will work and others won't. But maybe the author meant only some of the SanDisk cards work? In that case I might have one that doesn't.
Or do I need the acecard drivers in addition to the sundrv ones?

Thanks for your help,
Harald

[John Pierce]

As I recall from the dim recesses of my memory you must FDISK the card. The fdisk command resides in one of the hidden system directories. I also think there was a discussion here about this several years ago. I do know it can be done.

[Harald]

Hi John,

according to the document I have linked in my first post, I should used SDISK, which is similar to FDISK. But that is when I get the error messages.
However I will try and locate FDISK on the 95lx and try that.

Cheers,
Harald

[BobVA]

As I recall, the 95 has a V1.0 slot and the only "approved" memory solution was a SRAM (not flash) card. Upshot was that even with the Sundisk driver it was a bit finicky about cards, but I'm even hazier as to the "why?".

I *believe* the issue was that V2.0 expected a 12v supply on the PCMICA connector and the 95 didn't supply this. Consequently, it could *read* a generic V2.0 card, but not write to it. I think Sundisk made V2.0 cards which could be written at 5v, and you had to use one of those in the 95.

Ring a bell with anyone? I used to know this stuff :-)

Bob

Edited: 17 Mar 2013, 6:39 p.m.

[Christoph Giesselink]

I know that we sold programs for the 95LX in the early 90'ies on Flash cards, mainly on 1MB cards. I have one of later one here:

Segate Flash Card 2.5MB Model: ST72P5-S SunDisk

They were delivered with a OTP ROM 256KB card (Produced by SEIKO EPSON CORP.) named:

SUNDISK-SDPL5-Treiber 030339 (c) 1993 SUNDISK (c) 1993 altec ComputerSysteme Ver. 1.5

So I could confirm that the 95LX worked with Flash Cards. But 8MB or 10MB seem to be a little large for me. 1MB were usual at this time.

[Harald]

Hi Christoph,

thanks for the info. Unfortunately the lowest capacity compact flash card I have is 8MB. I am not even sure if there were 1Mb or 2Mb ones. I will try and get a smaller one if possible.

Cheers,
Harald