Problem- MB-20 Flash Hard Disk Help

[Teps71]

I have an MB-20 with a Cent 6 controller. It has ethernet and the 256 MB flash "hard disk". I would like to back up the flash hard disk so I can tweak the operation of the networking for DOS - but that is another issue.

I was able to pull the 256 MB SimpleTech Compact Flash card out of the controller and copy it's contents to a folder on my WindowsXP machine which I use for CAM. I purchased a 2 GB Lexar Compact Flash card and copied the files to it (including system files) and the controller will not boot to this card. I picked a 2 GB as that was the limit a DOS 6.22 machine could recognize without utilities and other funkiness back in the day. I even tried formatting and installing DOS 6.22 to the 2 GB flash card on the controller. The installation was successful but upon reboot the machine would not boot the "C" drive - the compact flash drive.

Has anyone else been successful in making a copy of the compact flash card? Does it require a 256 MB card? Are these brand specific? I've found the SimpleTech 256 MB card for over $100 but other brands are $14 or so.

Thanks in advance.

If anyone would like to tackle the networking issue - I would like to share the network drive from the MB-20 and not from my WinXP machine. I have been able to share from my WinXP machine successfully and mapped the drive from the MB-20 as drive N:, but I would like to share the files the other way for a couple of reasons. One is the WinXP machine also has a network connection to get to the internet and I don't particularly want to share all of my programs on a machine which hits the web even though I use a router and WinXP firewall. The other is I edit the programs with the Milltronics conversational offline program and if I leave that application open with the program I am editing and I try and copy the file over on the MB-20 the MB-20 reboots. If I had the share done on the MB-20 I would need to copy the files to the share (which would point to the C:\PARTS folder) which would eliminate the reboot issue and I wouldn't have a share on my WinXP machine.

Thanks again

[Teps71]

Okay, I got the CompactFlash issue figured out. It turns out that the CompactFlash needs to be configured as a non-removable device. Some CompactFlash cards will do this automatically when installed into a CF slot such as the type in the Milltronics controller. My particular card (Lexar 2 GB) did not. Lexar tech support was no help so I needed to run a utility that would change this state for me.

The utility can be downloaded Here

After running the utility, here was the procedure:

Pull the CF card (with the Mill powered off of course)
Insert the CF card into a USB reader connected to a PC
Copy the contents to a folder on the PC (be sure to include hidden/system files)
Remove the CF card
Install the replacement CF card
Copy the files from the folder on the PC to the CF
Insert the new CF card into the controller
Power on the controller with a bootable disk in the floppy drive of the controller (disk must have the sys command on it)
from the A: command prompt type "SYS C:" without the quotes, hit enter
Once you receive a message that the system files have been transfered pull the floppy and power cycle the controller.

The controller should boot to the CF card.

I paid $25 for the 2 GB CF card. It was the smallest I could find at the local Wally World. I wasn't looking for an increase in size (I'm only using 3 MB of the 256 GB card), rather a reliable backup of the CF card.

Now to tackle the network sharing from the Mill side....