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Hardware hacking my DT (Replacing the FlashROM Board)

Posted: Mon Oct 12, 2009 1:27 pm
by Foxx
All my progress is here: http://www.foxxs.blogspot.com/  I have done enough typing for the week, so I am not going to repost it here. For all the lazy people I will make an outline:

Dont bother buying any sort of Disk on Chip module, gender benders, or other simple magic jack that claims you can get a new HDD or CF card hooked up with nothing more than a screwdriver. ITS BULLSHIT! Anyone thats says otherwise is a liar, and douchebag. You need to replace the 2MM header on the DT motherboard. Ive spent months looking for a mating connector and the OEM that made the connectors no longer provide it. Only source for it is by scrapping the FlashROM board itself. If you will do that, just replace the header on the motherboard

To get ANY sort of compact flash drive working on the IDE bus, you need to solder the pin header, and replace it. I spent months looking for a mating connector to ake an adapter, and did not find one. Laptop drives, Microdrives, or anything that draws more than 300mA of power will not work (yet?). 1.8" ZIF HDDs and microdrives suffer from power "Brown-Outs" and dont work off the default IDE chain.

I have XP Pro SP2 trimmed down (slightly) and running like ass from an 8GB Compact flash card. CF Does PIO Modes only, expect it to run just as sluggish even with more physical storage space.
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Drivers are still something of an issue, but is much more minor in hindsight than than the IDE header modifications. The mod isnt hard if you can handle an iron.

Now that I have more storage space I have added more usefull apps, like this Slow Scan TV program. Ive interfaced my ham radio into my DT audio jack and used it to send modulated pictures over a radio RF link.
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Check my blog and picasa page for more information. Any questions asked that can be answered via reading my blog, using the search function here, or looking in the FAQ/Collective, will be either ignored, or ridiculed.

The End