More storage adventures with the little LC 475! I’ve already had some success replacing the original mechanical SCSI hard drive with a CompactFlash card, but naturally I couldn’t leave things alone. What happens when we try something a little larger? Say, an 8 GB CompactFlash card!

I’m still using the PCD-60B SCSI card reader, with the CompactFlash card sitting in a PCMCIA adapter. It’s a rather handy arrangement when it works. I’ve also been experimenting with different cards and Microdrives, trying to work out what the Macintosh is happy to recognise and what it really doesn’t want anything to do with.

The good news is that the 8 GB CompactFlash card is actually being recognised. That’s encouraging, especially after all the trouble I’ve had trying to get some of the mechanical Microdrives working in this arrangement. Getting a drive to appear is one thing, though. Convincing the software to initialise it properly is quite another!

I’m using FWB Hard Disk ToolKit for the partitioning and formatting, and it can be a bit temperamental. Sometimes the initialisation process seems to freeze, and getting everything working can take several attempts. Once a card is formatted it can behave quite happily, but reaching that point is proving to be the difficult bit.

I’ve also got a 2 GB CompactFlash card running a cut-down Disk Tools system, which gives me a useful working setup while I experiment with the larger cards. Unfortunately, when the partitioning software gets itself into trouble, I can end up having to restart the Macintosh before I can try again.

Eight gigabytes in a Macintosh LC 475! A rather ridiculous amount of storage for a computer of this vintage, but that’s hardly going to stop me from trying. The card is recognised, so now I just need to get it properly formatted. With a bit of luck, and possibly quite a few more attempts, I’ll get there!