Sintech Clone SD to IDE Adapters and Linux Fix
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- čas přidán 25. 08. 2021
- These Sintech cloned adapters (some branded Sintechi) stop working when partitioned with a Linux OS. I did some investigation and found a workaround.
I have a second channel:
/ @markfurneaux2659 - Věda a technologie
Going to guess it uses this FAT32 info to work out how it will emulate the disk, as the sectors contain information on the primary partition, giving a set of parameters that show number of heads, number of cylinders and sectors, and also is looking to see type of partition, so it can fake the report of how big the drive is when booting, and also how to allocate aligning the read and writes when translating.
The bug only surfacing after power on is the first time the (typically fat32) card is inserted, it reads this into RAM, and then works off this, irrespective of what you do to the card data wise, till power is lost and the card resets. Likely the reset line from the host does not actually reset the card, it merely is used to simulate resetting the drive, but the ram content is preserved though this.
Thank you, nice explanation and an introduction to a nice card. Not that I needc one, I have a collection of older hard drives, that vary in capacity and interface, that I use for replacement in machines, just take the new to it drive and see if it will still pass SMART, or, if older use NDD on it.
OMFG... It's been years since I've been frustrated with this issue and completely given up, spending so much on cfcards.
THANK YOU SO MUCH 💕🙏
Wow, I literally just bought two of these for some old Sun workstations! Thanks for the video!
i'm very grateful of you because you solved my long standing problem. I just want to add that the fat32 minimum size is about 260 MBytes so, it's not as easy to build a dummy partition 1 or 2 Mbytes big...you need at least 260 Mbytes.
Thank you for that information. But are you sure its just Fat32 that is supported? I've got the 40 pin device for a older Laptop and use windows xp with a 32GB SD Card and i'm relative sure i did setup it with ntfs as filesystem and it works quite well for the 2 weeks where i did play around with it.
Cool! I'm betting this is the same reason I was having issues with these and old Macintosh computers. I'll give your workaround a try. Thanks.
Thanks for your deep drive into this. Now knowing this thing is custom built to only really support Fat32 would explain some of my weird issues I had trying to use it in the og xbox (FatX) where the sd card would appear back and untouched when you removed it from the adapter, you can format the card and do whatever you like, but when you place it back in the adapter and boot the xbox nothing had changed.
Thank you!! I was having troubles with this adapter for so long until I found your video. Works like a charm. :)
Are you actually booting from Linux? What does your partition table look like as I find Ubuntu isn’t agreeable with this arrangement. Are you booting via MBR? An EFI partition?
@@jeffsheldon I just added first partition that is formatted in fat 32. It has something around 1 to 4 megabytes. I'm booting Antix Linux on an old tough book using MBR
Thanks for the video.
Thinking 🤔 about it, almost sounds like the chip is looking for an OEM manufacturer partition that is common on modern computers. A lot of HP computers have a restore partition at the beginning of the drive from the factory.
Great tip! Thank you for sharing! So FAT16 won't work either (thinking about MS-DOS 6.22)?
You Are Tha Man!!!! Thanks, Bro!!!!!
Thank you for posting this video! If only I had come across it two days ago :)
A thought crossed my mind about the vintage 9x era, the sizes of the HD's, and the workarounds that had to be done back then to overcome limitations.
Remember those "Promise" ide adapters with bios's on them, and even the _soft-bios's_ which had to be loaded on the first sector of the large drives in order for them to be usable by those old MS os's?
Might these adapters be submitting an uncompressed "soft-bios" from its ram at boot, before proceeding to the physical boot sector? That way, the 9x (dos's) would be able to address drives as large as xxGB, which our cf cards naturally are?
You might be onto something.
You can usually still buy PATA SSDs (normally come under industrial class 2.5 SSDs 2-32gb)
Interesting. It seesm like they was trying to get CHS parameters from boot sector to implement CHS mode but when i try it with CHS it seems like it doesnt work at all. So they probably just mess up causing out of buffer read. I was thinkong about decompiling firmwasre to fix CHS for old bioses which dont support LBA. Thats odd they mess up even LBA because it can be implemented without any data from boot sector
Hi Mark, Great job on reverse engineering these. What kind of lifespan can you get out of the SD cards when used as the boot OS drive? Seems like being overwritten many times will make them unreliable before too long.
Could be less than a year if its a cheap card, longer if its a decent brand. Having a lot of spare sectors should help for wear leveling. I can't find any specific raspi reviews, but if you search for dashcam microsd card reviews, you'll find ratings for endurance SD cards which should last quite a bit longer, if its really necessary.
they could be quite good for like DOS or Windows 95 or 98 but running like 2000 or XP or 7 or certain linux distros could shorten their life fast.
Does that mean that a disk that employs a non-MBR partition table won't work with these then?
In this case i really have no need for this, yet i stayed until the end^^
Good thing I plan to clone my win xp/ antix dual boot drive to one of these🙈
Once the SD card is corrupted, do you see the string "USBC" anywhere in it? I've had a few memory-cards and flash-drives get corrupted while using different cheap Chinese card-readers and USB-hubs from eBay, and the string "USBC" seems to be a common factor. I'm of the mind that all of these cheap Chinese devices are using a buggy controller that has a specific defect. 🤔 If so, it might be possible to create a universal "fixer" program to recover media corrupted by these. 🤞
(It's a pretty widespread problem judging from the results from doing a web-search for "usbc corrupted". 😒)
Weird that these work on my Amiga without any messing around. There's no MBR there and no FAT32 partition.
Probably because there is no valid DOS partition table, the extra snooping code never gets invoked (I also use these in Amigas with no issues)
Huh. This might be why I couldn't get one of these to work on an ancient OS/2 device.
Actually its not an "emulator" by any means. Its just SD cardreader but with IDE instead of USB
thats so strange
The Chinese cloned them but with a name like Sintech it seems like the original was from China as well
Wow, did the developer who made this even test it in a Mac? They overengineered it in such a stupid way.
Forget about using mmc on systems /they are known by damaging fast on write-read .I know because i use mmc s on raspberry pi and i have alot of problems .You should make copy s often if you use mmc s.better to use msata ssd.Here is one option what you can do with msata adaptor czcams.com/video/HetWKdvtIKo/video.html