Having been experimenting with CF on the HDR, I decided to try the D8B as well. My first attempts failed completely, even when using a known good CF card and adaptor from the HDR. Having several CF cards with HDR and D8B OS's on them meant that it was probably inevitable that I would get confused at some point and try to boot the D8B OS in the HDR. To my surprise the D8B OS did boot in the HDR (not completely, but far further than it was getting in the D8B).
This set me searching for the reason why it was doing this...and I found that there are variations in the BIOS firmware.
My original D8B BIOS has an ID string of 09/07/1999-i440BX-ED-2A69KD4FC-00. This BIOS would boot from the original HDD, but would not boot from CF.
The HDR BIOS has an ID string of 06/03/2003-i440BX-W977-2A69KD49C. This BIOS would boot from a CF card.
I swapped the BIOS chips from HDR to D8B and it worked. The D8B is now running on a CF card
Whilst I had the chips out I dug out my eeprom reader and grabbed backups of the BIOS files, and then using a spare chip, burnt the working BIOS to it and installed...works perfectly.
Should probably point out that this is on the newer motherboard. I have had no success with CF or SATA on the older motherboard, but I did get it to work with an IDE DOM (Disk On Module).
Regards
John
