LGR 486 Update! Installing CompactFlash Storage 

Just FYI: do NOT use any power-saving settings related to spindown of the drive while using these. the CF card uses the spindown command as a "I'm about to be removed" signal, and will NOT come back up unless it's power cycled. These are also used to upgrade/repair old ipod classics, and the aggressive disk spindown will cause issues unless disabled.

Nice seeing you enjoy some of the benefits of mixing new with old! I am using SD cards now, the adapters are quite similar and work just like you showed.

I would've killed to have a 2GB hd in my 486. I remember when I got my first 1GB drive and thought that would be all the space I'd ever need.

Format C: with sarcasm. Best line... Loving the old school hardware things Clint! Makes me want to break out some of my old machines and see what I can get working again! Ah the sounds and smells of an old pc... Nothing like it!

9:30 How many times have you installed MS-DOS from floppies?

Whistling Duke3D music while installing MS-DOS? Priceless :D

>Woodgrain PC >Woodgrain Background >Another fresh video of LGR. 10/10.

It's actually part of CompactFlash specification to behave like an IDE disk (one of their 3 modes, as I recall). That's why ATA-to-CF adapters are... passive, with the pins connected straight over. Also: Search for the Microdrive - it is a magnetic hard disk in CompactFlash size format.

Solid drive in 486 pc? This sounds like a Druaga1 idea 😀 BTW great video i fully enjoyed it

Have you ever considered doing a live stream of you doing this? (Or have you already?) It's very soothing to listen to and watch. Helps me focus on the work I need to do for online college classes. You should do more of these and help a girl out Clint :P

I'd love to find a 486. I used to have a few but foolishly got rid of them all and it seems they're rare as hens teeth and people want a mint for them.

Nice video! I work with some old systems and so use some of these CF card adapters. The SYBA adapter you held up at 2:25 is great for plugging two drives up - some of the old mobo BIOS have a hard time with handling two separate adapters in master/slave configuration but that one has never given me trouble!

A:\> c: Invalid drive specification "Of course it's not going to 'C' anything." :D

It's really cool that people are able to max out these old machines! Or even go beyond what was possible at the time; such as this! In a similar vain I like sticking SSD's in my G3 and G4 PPC Macs. It breathes new life into them and is more reliable than 10+ yr old standard rotational hard drives! There are pre-made solutions and also adapter cards for CF, SD cards and even mSATA drives!

WOW! loook at your woodgrain pc , I love this iconic item of your collection ! :)

I remember you had a networking card in the Woodgrain 486. Have you thought about wiring up networking and then rocking some old-school LANMAN file sharing? You can get it to work with Windows, most NASes, and samba.

Just remember to check the pins on the converter thing every now and then. I played myself a few times trying to force the CF card into the thing and bending the pins in result.

Great video as ever! One tiny suggestion: Use more partitions with less size. FAT16 partitions are indeed max 2 GB in size, but that comes at a cost of having 32 kb clusters which creates an insane amount of slack space. For example, you have a file of 1 kb, it still uses 32 kb storage on the drive. So, I'd recommend actually to use 4 partitions of 500 MB each, which will use 8 kb clusters, a lot less slack space. Or 2 500 MB partitions and one of 1 GB. :-)

FreeDOS supports larger partitions and you would be able to use the entire 4GB of the flash card, but I think that you want to use MSDOS for the system to be accurate with its age.

Your retro computer videos are always so good!!! Please keep more of them coming, I just love to watch these! :D

I've been using that same wood-texture wallpaper for all my computers for years now. People always find it weird, and then I see you using the same! :D

Clint, I don't know if you were looking for a specific flash card or simply got lucky, but the most important thing with these adaptors is usng a UDMA-enabled CF card, which you do happen to have. That is what determines whether the motherboard will detect the device as a fixed or removable storage. It's less critical for DOS, but in Windows installations, true UDMA mode is absolutely necessary, or you won't even get pass the disk selection prompt. Motherboard BIOS, especially on laptops, will often reject non-UDMA cards entirely. Majority of CF cards you find online these days are non-UDMA. SanDisk has a list of card on their site that are UDMA-enabled. Most of them are listed as "discontinued".

Once you're happy with your configuration, you should create a disk image of it, so you can re-image a new card quickly in the event of a failure.

The soothing sound of the 5.25' drive is the only sound you need. Also thanks for taking the advise of wood graining the spare drive bays - looks SOOO much better :D

Dude-man I love these speriments'/upgrade videos! Trials and tribulations, I'm there with you every step of the way :) It's awesome to see something work the first time. Bringing 20th century tech into the 21st. I think Shakespeare said it best: There's more than one way to skin a cat. There's more than one way to shoot a gat. Keep on keeping on :)

I'm so glad to see how messy the inside of your 486 is. If other people (especially other experienced vintage PC builders) can't get it tidy, it just reminds me that that is just how these old machines are, and it's not just my own sub-par abilities!

I love the background music always, that jazz and the old computers, it has a special feeling.

Awesome content as always. An idea I'd like to see.. How about LGR Tech Tales: Sierra?

I have an old computer(I think it's a 486) in my grandma's basement... not sure if it still works (It booted last time I turned it on, but that was about 10 years ago) but I'd love to take it apart and see what's all inside it and see if I can't get it fully optimized and running again. Visiting my family in WI this summer, so maybe it'll be my summer project while I'm up there! Always wanted to build a collection of retro machines, unfortunately I don't have the room for it. :(

Compact flash cards also come in fixed disk mode (windows sees it as a hard drive rather than removable storage) I bought a Transcend Industrial 8gb for that reason. It works great on a hp compaq nc6000

Ive done this a few times over the years. Tip of advice... find an old 3.5" cf reader thats usb. Must be cf only. Remove the board and install the cf to ide adapter inside. Its how i did it to 2 machines. Now you have an external cf. ;)

Thanks so much for this! I was having trouble booting from the compactflash card, but hddclear did the trick.

I miss the DOS era. While I am keeping up with evolving tech over the years, I feel a little out of place after 30 years of home computing. Nice to know there are options out there to revisit older tech. Thanks for sharing.

This was a very soothing video. I loved the background music and the fond memories of my DOS days.

Sorry Clint, there's no good technical reasons to install from floppy when you can just copy it straight to the card, however, there doesn't need to be. "Because I like the noise" is reason enough :)

I used an IDE to CF card to run a router OS a while back on an old P3 IBM Netvista MB. I'm also planning on running a CF card setup like this in a retro PC. Good to see that there is hope for this kind of setup on an old PC such as yours.

These are my favorite videos of yours, just working on old machines. Great stuff :D

I loved DOS 6.22 back in the day. All my games were 3.5" DOS games. Used to be so fast.

Man i really like your channel, all these old pc´s make me feel nostalgic, reggards from Brazil.

Putting an SSD in a 486... am I watching Druaga1 or LGR?!

I've been saying it for years (and years and years...) I really really must dig out my old 486 DX4/100 and get her up and running again. What a sweet machine it was back in the day.

I love your hardware vids the most. Thanks!

Man, your videos are always just so relaxing and calming.

TIL an OS dislikes having its system partition forcibly removed while on

dear LGR.... you may be riding the retro-wave here (and quite entertainingly so) but this is actually a very applicable skill. Most industrial machines from the 90s and early 2000s feature hard drives and WIN95 or WIN98. Could you do a feature on how to move enterie partitions onto the CF-adapter setup to "copy" the entire disk??? Most industrial machines (lathes, mills, injection machines etc.) still offer support if your disk breaks, but it's super expensive.

So... basically a 486, with a SSD-esque setup?

My neighbour just brought over her pc for me to fix. It's a 20 year old Tiny branded pc ! 80gb hard drive is knackered so have a IDE to CF adapter on order, thanks for the idea. I think it's marvelous she still uses this old pc and don't want to upgrade to something modern :)

Top notch rendition of the duke3d theme :-)

I love this video. You have an amazing sense of capturing the wonderful aesthetic qualities of this time period.

offtopic ; there are bootable dos CD version, (6.22 or 7. something) also win 3.1 on cd . makes install alot easier when you ran out of floppy disks or damaged .

awesome! I was just about to buy one of those today, but I saw the bracketed version worked perfectly for you. I guess I'll pick one of those up then.

I love that case! Can you install Windows 98 or XP on a CF card like a SD card? Also I didn't know Compact Flash cards were still being made. My first digital camera from the early 2000's (HP Powershot 215) used one.

Just picked up a 486 Machine. Thanks for all your years of RU-vid content.

Have you ever done a video in Freedos? How do you feel about the project?

I like the idea of being able to easily remove the drive and put it in a modern computer. However, the one thing that concerns me is the logevity of a CompactFlash card. I'm using a IDE to SATA bridge that I've been pretty happy with.

Why does poping in a CompactFlash card look satisfying?

Clint we should hook up. In 1985 , I purchased a Commodore 64. I started writing my own software and games, which led me to buy the floppy drive. I wrote ( with the help of a algebra genius) a spiral graph style screen saver, each line plotted was in a random color and was quite dazzling in the day, and a early G U.I. When the program was loaded and ran, it spilt the main screen with a 4 square window box. In the center of each box was lettering. I figured out how to write ' strig" commands as the controller for the Atrari 2600 fit the port on the Commodore. So all you had to do was move the joystick to the corresponding window and click the red fire button to execute the program of choice. I gotta tell you, I did not know what I had! When Windows 3.0 launched yes it was better, but I had the mouse and the G U.I. concept long before Bill Gates. I look back and I love the glory days! You are the the offical keeper of nerd records my man.

Yah -- I'm almost glad my Amiga 1200 needs a fan to survive outputting 1280x720 pixels, because it got awfully quiet in there with a CF card "harddisk".

I've had some bad experiences with Compact Flash. I collect retro Macintoshes, and a few months ago I began experimenting with flash storage in my G3 Powerbooks. I bought an mSata SSD (with PATA adapter) from an old friend on eBay and installed it in my PDQ Powerbook. It worked like a charm, except for the fact that drag-and-drop transfers from USB drives of any file larger than about 600 KB would freeze the Powerbook. Drag-and-dropping from CDs worked fine, and extracting files from USB onto the SSD using Stuffit Expander worked fine, but dragging and dropping from USB would ALWAYS freeze the computer. I did some research and found out that other people had encountered problems with USB and mSATA, but also read that Compact Flash didn't appear to have these same glitches with USB. I bought a Compact Flash card and a CF-to-PATA adapter off of eBay. The card worked fine in the Powerbook for a while - the computer booted about 30 seconds slower than with the mSATA SSD - but the adapter literally burnt out the same day I installed it. The PDQ Powerbook was now dead for reasons I couldn't explain, but I still had a Wallstreet and a recently-acquired Lombard Powerbook. I bought two replacement adapters, and they somehow killed the IDE controllers in both of the remaining Powerbooks. I think I'll stay away from using Compact Flash cards as hard-drives in Macs from now on, although I did recently buy a Compact Flash PCMCIA card, which should provide an alternative file transfer method to USB for my new Lombard Powerbook.

this brings me back memories, now windows 3.1 and u are set xD

I use IDE to Compact flash in my Tandy 1000, Amiga 4000, 600 as well as two of my 486 machines. The write and read errors were greatly mitigated for me when I switched to a specific CF Card. The card I use is a Kingston 4GB card. I have not had any issues since moving over to those cards. I use the exact same adapters that you do, it appears. I got mine from the local Microcenter before they stopped carrying them, and then from Amazon afterward. They work quite a treat. I have two IDE to SD card adapters as well and where as they work, the cards I have are slower than the Compact Flash drives, even though the cards are rated at high speeds. Maybe it's the adapter I have. :Shrug:

You need to give this computer a name! I recommend Harold or Eddie.

Great stuff! Disable the write behind cache on SMARTDRV - I assume it probably enabled itself on install of DOS? My issues reading drive C disappeared after doing that.

I really want a modern computer with a wooden yellowish case like that. It would protect it from robbers (=

Another great video from LGR. If you haven't already, it would definitely be cool if you created a playlist of the 486 upgrade videos, and linked it in the description.

stick an am5x86-133 in there (OC to 160Mhz)

Greetings Clint, woodgrain whiskey batch number 486... Now that would be a good will to your staunch fans mate. Thankyou for your amazing insight and effort when it comes to the school of old.. Your a good man Clint. All the way from Australia. L. G. R FOR THE WIN!👍

Like the Duke T

I got myself a little SD to IDE adaptor and I've been using it as a second/removable drive on a Win 98 machine I have. I just unscrewed one of the expansion slots and stuck it through that, it works great. It doesn't look good but it's in the back so you can't see it at all.

i put a cf card into my ipod mini and now its completely silent

I used to have a monitor that looked EXACTLY like the one you are using, only mine was branded as Mitsubishi, specifically it was the Mitsubishi Diamond Plus 72. Must have been the OEM for gateway. It was a superb monitor, I have spent countless hours playing MS Flight Simulator 2000 Pro on it...

Try to watch youtube on old pc's with windows

I have been trying to remember Tyrian for the better part of a decade! thank you!

format with sarcasm! lol

Hello. Great video, perfect for young people starting their adventure with RETRO equipment. I have a question, the program you use in 6:48, where it can be downloaded from the Internet. I looked through some of my favorite sites with RETRO software but I didn't find it. Or where I can download a DOS boot disk with the programs you have. Did you make such a disk yourself? Regards, Martin

45 dislikes? This is heresy!

As Brandon Upchurch mentioned, DoMs and special industrial CF cards use SLC "Single Level Cell" NAND flash. When used as a hard drive this is going to be way more reliable because it can sustain many more write cycles than the cheaper and more common MLC or TLC flash. Not sure whether @lazygamereviews Clint knew this or not but that Transcend TS4GCF300 is a perfect card for this as they are cheap and use SLC and are a good size for pre-2000 era computers. They do use UDMA 5 (Ultra ATA/100 100MB/s) interface speed but are backwards compatible with modes 0-4 for non-UDMA systems. Clint you are the absolute frikkin' man and I immensely enjoy all your content!!!

I want that Duke Nukem shirt.

Just got myself an internal 40 pin adapter and a Transcend CF card and it's doing nicely so far (on a newer motherboard, though). First I backed up my existing drive to a Raspberry Pi via EtherDFS. Created a small boot disk with EtherDFS, fdisk, format a packet driver and Volkov Commander. Used that to format the CF card and then copied my system back from the Raspberry Pi...absolutely painless!

Use a cf card in my Amiga 1200 as a hdd

Fantastic Clint! I restored my first computer, a Pentium 233, and went the IDE to SD route when the original 2GB HDD, and then the 20GB I had to put in both died. It works good other than I can't run DMA in windows for some reason. Still faster than and HDD though, and I can quickly mount the SD card on any of my modern computers. I have DOS 7 and WIN98 though with two 4GB partitions. I'm sure 8GB is all I'll ever need (heh).

Oh my. That is a beautiful rig. Seriously. It's so cool in so many subtle ways. The colors mis-match, and yet somehow still complement each other. The buttons and the green display are ultra retro-cool. The same goes for that CD drive with its control buttons. I wonder if a case like that (and matching components) could be bought for a modern rig? If I had the ability, I would totally buy that case and put my new computer in there.

Great "sneaker net" solution! Thanks for sharing it.

Ahhhh compact flash. I remember the first one I had was for my digital camera and it was 128mb. I was so excited I could store about 80 low grade photos.

Nice addition to a fine wood grain PC. Just curious what your mileage has been with the read/write error, that 'popped-up' during your video. Is this a reoccurring problem? I have an application for older PC's, which are being used in-place of failing DEC & HP Dumb Terminals, that would benefit from this HDD upgrade. Sourcing the flash memory cards & reader seems relatively inexpensive. As time goes on, locating older working HDD's (under 2 GB) has become quite challenging. Combined with age, & failure rate, a solid-state solution seems like an acceptable option.

There are a few VERY nice benefits of using a CF card as storage on really old laptops! I'm surprised you did not mention that they use significantly less power, put out much MUCH less heat, and weigh a hellava lot less than the vast majority of old 2.5" traditional HDDs in Pentium and lower class laptops. Its amazing how massive of a difference throwing a solid state storage solution into a 486 laptop can really unleash the beast within! ^_^

I don't know why it's so satisfying to watch you tinker with these old machines.

if you wanted something more retro, I would recommend to find a "micro drive" which is exactly the same as CF but it use a spinning platter inside it, I've have it once and taken apart

I want to see that drive that plugs right into the IDE connector work, that looks awesome.

Nothing like waking up to a new LGR. Thanks for a wonderful video Clint

I just came back from a video you made in 2012, and the tone is just so much different. Now LGR is a lot more upbeat than it used to be.

Ahhhhhh... the fun we don't get to have with DosBox. I think a 486 ... maybe a Pentium ... was the last computer I built. Kinda wanna do it again for reasons like this.

I love watching you working on old hardware, so much show I have starting my own project a 686. Have you thought about making a tips and tricks video for restoring old drives and such. I don't know where to start on cleaning out my 5¼-inch drive.

I'm gonna put a SATA SSD with a SATA/IDE converter into my XP gaming machine I'm working on. Nice thing about having more modern interfaces got storage is you can easily back it up on a new machine

I would have moved it down one slot, I would think it would be easier to get your fingers in there to remove the card. Awesome video, tempted to do this with my Tandy 386.

Clint, have you tried FreeDOS lately? if so what do you think of it? what's the compatibility like? I found that FreeDOS works great on dosbox and has a lot of extra tools that avoid a lot of headaches on the regular dos install

Is there any reason you didn't keep your hard drive connected to the machine alongside your new flash solution? Seems like it would be nice to hold onto it, particularly out of fear for those occasional CF drive errors you were seeing.

We had a 486 until the late 90's early 2000's. I was way into computers back then but we didn't have money for a new computer. Crazy to think i'd ever want to go back and mess with one again lol. I've enjoyed watching your videos on this computer. I think I was getting most of my computer upgrades from goodwill at some point haha.

It's crazy with how much noise we put up back in the day. I got a SCSI hard drive for my Amiga 500 last year, and while it was blazingly fast (in A500 terms) it was so freaking loud, it was almost unbearable. So, I switched out the actual HD with a SCSI2SD-Controller and it's so much better now. So yeah, I understand completely where you are coming from at the beginning, saying the hard drive got too loud.

Holy crap your desktop looks so close to mine. time to play some Prey! Awesome content as usual ty LGR