Memory Card Explorer for the Elan P423

[Jonathan Chapman]

> I ended up getting a PCI bus PC Card adapter based on the TI PCI1131
> PCI-TO-CARDBUS CONTROLLER UNIT chip. I set that up in a Linux system
> and eventually managed to get some MTD (Memory Technology Devices)
> software installed so that I could read and write to a variety of
> linear flash cards.

Careful doing this, always flip the write protect switch! Default behavior, when the kernel/pcmcia-utils is trying to figure out what's in the slot is to run down a list of identification steps. The final one is to scribble on the card's memory space to see if it's writable SRAM! Blasted a card just by inserting it a few years ago, fortunately one I already had backups of.

If you don't wish to futz with expensive commercial software or rolling your own, you can almost certainly use the Data I/O card utils with a generic ISA to PCMCIA adapter. I have their actual branded hardware, and it's a Vadem PCMCIA chip that follows whatever the early Intel standard was. Software is available on the Data I/O groups.io file archive. The Data I/O software includes basically "dd for Flash cards."

Thanks,
Jonathan