in 1980, an H8 with five 16-megabyte hard drives would have been unimaginable

Eric Mack

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May 20, 2025, 1:21:40 AM5/20/25

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Not to mention unaffordable.

Yet, here I am with dual compact flash and five 16-megabyte partitions (out of my 8 GB CF. Oh the waste of unused space. 😊)

Thank you to all who participated in the development of this board.

Eric

norberto.collado koyado.com

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May 20, 2025, 1:28:11 AM5/20/25

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Eric,

The 8GB CF was to be used with the H67 controller, but for some reason I was not able to get it running. The H67 uses all 8GB CF space. Plan B was to move those CF cards to the CF controller to get your system running. We use 256MB CF on such controller and not the 8GB CF.

Norberto

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Eric Mack

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May 20, 2025, 1:44:42 AM5/20/25

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I can’t imagine what I would do with 8 GB of space on an H8. My comment was not a complaint, but marveling at how far things have come. I remember when a 5MB Corvus drive was around $5500. Wow, Times have changed. Thank you for helping keep these old systems alive.

Eric

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glenn.f...@gmail.com

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May 21, 2025, 9:10:47 PM5/21/25

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So in case it’s of interest: here are two things that we’ve done that take advantage of all the extra room on a large CF device:

On the Z67-IDE+ Norberto devised a way to break the space up into multiple instances, each of which can have multiple operating systems and partitions installed. Think of them as “super partitions” if you like. The way you select a “super partition” is via thumbwheel switches. This can be handy, for example, in bringing up a new operating system configuration while leaving your master copy untouched. I think I recall Ken Owen setting up different instances for different purposes, e.g. one for programming, one for office automation, etc. kind of cool.

The other thing I’ve done is to implement what I call a “jukebox”. This is for HDOS only at the moment. It is implemented via a device driver. What it does is take the top 1/2G chunk of the CF drive and use it to store up to 4,096 H8D images (this is the original H17 disk format). Since we have a large library of those this allows you to store virtually any disk image from the old HUG archives or elsewhere and mount it on demand. Terry Smedley assisted me in this with some wonderful utilities. While I wrote this for the Z67-IDE+ I believe it would be possible to convert the code to work with either the H8 or H89 Compact Flash drive boards. That’s somewhere on my list of things to tackle some day, if there’s interest….