I like to use a SDHC card in an adapter to run a notebook computer with Puppy. I bought several adapters on eBay, and they have worked well, but today I am kind of stuck.
I have a Dell Inspiron 6000 that uses an IDE HDD. When I put a blank SD card into the adapter in the IDE HDD bay, the Inspiron takes forever to recognize the drive. I can boot Puppy from a USB drive, and the SD card shows up, but it is listed as a floppy drive.
OK, the floppy drive thing happens all the time. I have made Puppy boot from SD to IDE before, even though it shows up as a floppy drive on other computers, so it might not be the issue.
When I try to mount the drive, it takes forever, and the HDD indicator LED flashes all the time it's trying to open.
I an partition and format the drive and mark it as bootable using GParted, but again it takes a long time to work.
So, does anyone know why this might be? The same adapter and card work fine in other computers that I have tried, but the Inspiron hates it.
SD to IDE Adapter disk access is really slow
Description of SD Card settings
Using SanDisk UltraII SD card, 2GB. Also used an 8 GB card, forget the brand, though.
Formatted to ext2 using GParted from Puppy Linux Precise Puppy after booting to a USB drive first.
Also tried formatting to FAT32 on a Windows machine, then inserting into the IDE adapter. Still very slow access to files on the disk. HDD LED is continuously on. This is not the behavior I get on other machines, and I suspect now that it's a quirk of my notebook computer.
Oddly, the computer has no trouble with a regular IDE hard drive in that bay. I wonder if the IDE emulation is not quite up to standards with the adapter.
When I put the adapter and SD card into a different computer, it accesses the SD card fine, but, as mentioned before, it shows it to be a floppy drive, even though it can boot to it, and the drive is multiple gigabytes.
If it is a quirk of the notebook computer, this may not be worth pursuing.
Formatted to ext2 using GParted from Puppy Linux Precise Puppy after booting to a USB drive first.
Also tried formatting to FAT32 on a Windows machine, then inserting into the IDE adapter. Still very slow access to files on the disk. HDD LED is continuously on. This is not the behavior I get on other machines, and I suspect now that it's a quirk of my notebook computer.
Oddly, the computer has no trouble with a regular IDE hard drive in that bay. I wonder if the IDE emulation is not quite up to standards with the adapter.
When I put the adapter and SD card into a different computer, it accesses the SD card fine, but, as mentioned before, it shows it to be a floppy drive, even though it can boot to it, and the drive is multiple gigabytes.
If it is a quirk of the notebook computer, this may not be worth pursuing.