4gig cf cards- mount problems Options

[arthuregg]

So in the effort to create a an amazing little workstation (and to decrease ipod envy) I got myself a 4gig cf card (hitachi 4gig microdrive).

I'm curious if i managed to get the correct one- as the one I have is being stubbern. It mounts on my desktop just fine, but refuses on the zaurus. While the card manager sees it as "anonmous memory" attempts to mount it (mount /dev/hda1 /mnt/cf) fail. attempting to fdisk it, doing some thing like:

fdisk -l /dev/hda

nets me nothing, while

fdisk /dev/hda

fails to open the device.

does anybody have any experience trying to get one of these cards to work that can point me in the right direction? I've tried mounting it both under cacko1.21 and oz3.5.5 and 3.3.6

[mikeyp]

The general discussion on the various photography boards and forums is that Creative/Hitachi are now shipping Muvos' with a modified microdrive that is NOT CF compatible. It's not clear to me exactly what modifications have been made to the drive, and theres lots of speculation out there on the net as to what was done.

If you're using a Hitachi white label OEM 4Gb microdrive, the key point is to check the barcode on the microdrive. To date, I've collected the following ino:

Last digits of barcode / CF compatable
3BA Yes
41C Yes
42B Yes
43B Yes
44C No
45C No

The changes made are clearly shutting down the extraction of microdrives from Muvos for digital camera use, since the cameras can't be upgraded easily.. but, with an open source Linux OS, I'm sure it's only a matter of time before we figure what the trick is. At which point Zaurus owners can scoop up all the non-CF microdrives from eBay that nobody else wants

I don't think this is a problem with specific Zaurus models, it's the model of microdrive itself. This link includes a statement from a Hitachi engineer confirming the OEM drives are not CF compatible.
Steve's Digicams

For anyone that has a CF compatible microdrive , the existing howto covers everything.

Since I got my '44C' working under win2k pro with a CF reader, there is hope. I love to hear what anyone else is learning about the modified 'muvodrives' .