Saturday 8 July 2017

Compact Flash card IDE Adapter and the Aurora QL

The old Aurora card is getting a refurbishment. It has spent probably 10 years in a box when space became tight and the old tower case it had been installed in had to be removed. A new case for the Aurora and its supporting components was needed. A cheap £30 black case was ordered from Amazon and the Aurora card, Qubide 2.01, SuperGold card and old style backplane were installed. Amazingly the original hard drive used with the Aurora system was still fully functional and held all the installed software. Installing these cards and HDD was not simple. The power connectors from the PSU were not compatible with the backplane power sockets. Fortunately the original 1990s PC power supply had been stored as well. The power connectors were removed from this and grafted on to the power cables from the new PSU. Fortunately the colour coding of the power cables inside PCs had not changed. The original PSU was also too large to fit in to the new case.

The next major problem came with the need to fit a floppy disk, HDD and CDROM in the case, basically even when all the modern USB cables and connectors were stripped out there was not enough room for everything inside.

Browsing Amazon, there was a CF card adaptor advertised that had been reviewed by a QL Aurora user and found to be suitable for the Aurora. Checking with Dilwyn Jones QL blog suggested that he had been the reviewer. So reassured the CF card adaptor was ordered. As the card was designer to connect to a 2 inch IDE cable and 2 inch to 3.5 inch adaptor was also bought.


Getting the correct orientation of the CF card adapter and the IDE cable adapter was tricky. The location of pin 1 on the  cable adapter is marked by a small arrow seen in the image. As for the CF card adapter pin 1 was indicated on the circuit board in small print. The cable adapter had one of the central pin holes in the connector missing. This needed to be drilled out as the card had all 44 pins to be connected.

None the less it was all fitted together and here is it with an old CF card inserted in a test run copying files from the HDD to the CF card.


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