Little Boardâ„¢/486e Technical Manual
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Compact Flash Solid-State Disk
The Little Board/486e connector J2 supports a Compact Flash device, a solid-state IDE hard-disk
emulator. It acts as a removable hard-disk drive. You can f ormat, read , and write the Compac t
Flash device much as you would a standard IDE drive.

Enabling the Drive

The Compact Flash interface emulates an IDE drive to the operating system. To use this feature,
enable it using Setup. The Compact Flash interface takes up one of the positions of the primary
IDE drive controller. If you enable the Compact Flash interface, you can only add one additional
hard drive to the primary IDE controller.

Master/Slave Setting

The Compact Flash interface can be configured to emulate a master or slave IDE device in the
system.
! To configure the drive as master, install a jumper on W3.
! To configure the drive as slave, remove the jumper on W3.
An IDE drive attached to the primary IDE co ntrolle r m ust h ave the o ppo site settin g.

Solid-State Disk Preparation

To prepare Compact Flash device for use in the system, insert the device in connector J2. Boot the
system and prepare the drive just as you would a new IDE drive. That is, use the DOS FDISK
utility to set up one or more partitions, an d then u se th e DO S FO RMA T util ity to fo rma t th e driv e.
A Compact Flash device, properly formatted and programmed, can be used as a boot drive. To do so,
you must configure the drive to be master by installing a jumper on W12. First FDISK the device
as a primary DOS partition, then format the drive using the /S option to include the DOS operating
system.