Re: [NTLK] ATA Support (was: Connecting my Newton-Questions!)

Sonny Hung wrote:
> James your situation with Clarity bonking out so often (IF
> you did a reset) with the card installed maybe that caused the issue?

Sonny, I often do soft resets where I scratch in Rs in the box at lower
right and then I am asked if I wish to reboot and I confirm the reboot, it
reboots and all is well for a while. But when my 32MB died, a soft reset
didn't work, so I had to press and hold the reset button on back for a few
seconds. But after doing that, the Newt rebooting but not all the way. I
could see packages had loaded but it appeared frozen. So I had to press the
reset button on back a couple more times. In the end, I thought removing
the batteries would work, but after that the linear card was no longer
recognized in the Newt; however, the Newt wasn't locked up anymore on boot
either.

So I know for a fact through this experience that multiple resets (and
possibly battery removal) zapped that EEPROM to its death. It had nothing
to do with flash memory write cycles at all. I never had a problem with
cards in the past, so I never though to eject that card before going through
this process. Indeed, I never had such a hard lockup in the past where I
needed to pull the batteries either.

On a related but separate note...

I had an offlist conversation with PCBman today, a part of which I'd like to
post to this list (my comments on top, with PCBman below that):

/-/-/-/-/-/-/
>I did spot a cheap 256MB Linear card, but I've never read on NewtonTalk if
>such massive cards are even compatible with the Newton. If they are, I
>would have expected someone to have spoken about it in the past.
> Would you know about these?
I don't think they will work. Remember, the Newton appeared when 1MB cards
were big and 2MB cards were huge. In order to address the bigger cards there
are additional entries in the CIS. Without going into the specifics, the OS
would need to be updated to recognize these. It is possible that you could
plug one of these cards in and see SOME memory. They are, after all, just a
contiguous array of memory chips. My feeling is that it would just be
reported as a lower capacity card and you would not have access to the rest
of it (at least not on the Newton). I could see a scenario of 32 or 64MB
formatted for the Newton and the rest formatted for a PC but I digress...
/-/-/-/-/-/-/

Any thoughts on the size vs. compatibility of linear flash for the 2100?

Also, PCBman suggested that Notion might act as a good class-attendance
substitute for Clarity. Has anyone tried that?

Many thanks,

James Wages

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Received on Wed Aug 13 19:42:35 2008