Which interface is used to access the microdrive?

[texaninjapan]

Do the Zaurus SL-Cxx0 series access microdrives by using the compactflash interface or the CF ATA interface?  According to the Hitachi website the newer Microdrives are \"CF+ (ATA and PCMCIA compatible)\".  I am sure you know where I am going with this.  I am curious if the newer \"crippled\" Muvo2 drives will still be operational in a SL-Cxx0 series Zaurus.

Thanks in advance.
TexaninJapan

[tz]

The new ones probably won\'t and there were many threads on other sites abou this, HOWEVER, I doubt they are completely crippling access since that would take a lot of extra work.  They are probably just changing the commands so they aren\'t true ATA (though I don\'t have any idea what they would be).  If that is the change, the ide driver could be modified to try the altered command or commands (if they just change the ID command it would break everything).  Save a copy of the microcode for the current muvo2 and see if the new one only has a few bytes changed.

The CF+ interface is a superset of the CFATA.  Both are proper subsets of PCMCIA (which is why you can have just wires adapt PCMCIA to CF cards both ways).  I have a Toshiba 5gig PCMCIA HD that works on the Zaurus through such an adpater, as does my Cisco 350 card.

[evilyoda]

Has anybody done any work on this, such as trying to stick the firmware from a non-crippled microdrive onto a crippled one? Or has anybody looked at the kernel to see if a workaround can be implemented? Thanks!
- Josh

[tz]

I would like to try, however I'm not going to spend several hundred dollars (moreso than the time) on something that only has a chance of working.  If it is something worse like a pin-swap it might be able to be compensated for.  Someone with access to a logic analyzer would be needed.

Normally you need to properly communicate to the device to change the firmware (basically a wierd IDE write command).  But that creates the chicken-and-egg problem - until a driver could be written for the crippled drives, you can't upgrade the drive firmware.

If it is merely some simple command swap, it might be visible from the Muvo2 update microcode.

[Guest]

Do you have access to both versions of the Muvo2 microcode? I don't own a Muvo2 _period_ so I couldn't really legally work on any of the firmware, could I?