CompactFlash boot drive

Compact Flash boot drive

Changing your HDD for a CF boot drive with a Compact Flash card and adapter. This is primarily done by ThinkPad X40 series owners due to the extremely slow speeds of the 1.8" HDD.

What you need

• Passive IDE to CF adapter
• Compact Flash (CF) card with the following
  • UDMA support
  • X266 speed or better
  • preferably one that identifies as Fixed disk
  • 4 or 8GB capacity, depending on needs

Tested adapters

ATTENTION!

the second (slave) slot on dual slot adapters does not work on the ThinkPad X41 and X41 Tablet due to the SATA to IDE bridge. But it will work fine on other like the ThinkPad X40 where it will function as having 2 drives attached as master and slave

• Addonics AD44MIDECF (single slot)
• Addonics AD44MIDE2CF (dual slot)

Removable vs Fixed disk type

Most newer compact flash cards identify themselves as Removable instead of Fixed disk. For Linux this does not cause any problems, but Windows has issues with it and will refuse to partition such a drive, and even if you manage to get it installed it will not be able to hibernate.

For the SanDisk Extreme III and IV adapters you should look for a DOS utility called ATCFWCHG.COM (try google). You will need to boot DOS and run it with the CF configured as either the master on the primary IDE interface or the master on the secondary interface. It will not work if the drive is attached as a slave or to any other interfaces.

To set a SanDisk Extreme adapter attached to the primary IDE interface to Fixed disk

ATCFWCHG.COM /P /F

To set a SanDisk Extreme adapter attached to the secondary IDE interface (Ultrabay) to Fixed disk

ATCFWCHG.COM /S /F

useful links

• ThinkPads Forum discussion on the subject
• Flash memory speed - check out the UDMA CF link