I have recently succeeded in getting both my QX-10 and QX-16 to boot CP/M off of the compact flash adapter I designed.

This was done by modifying the IPL ROM assembly code for both the QX-16 and QX-10 to support booting from the CompactFlash when no floppy is in the boot drive.

The QX-16 IPL is an 8K 27C64 that already supports booting from an MFM winchester hard drive, so it just required slight modifications to support an IDE CompactFlash instead.

The QX-10 however only uses a 2K 27C16 ROM and does not support hard drive booting, so in order to make room in the ROM I ended up removing the code that tested the Z80 instruction set. This made just enough room to add the CompactFlash boot code, at the cost of no longer detecting if your processor has a fault in it.

In addition to the IPL code I had to disassemble and fix the Loader found on the system tracks to support booting from CompactFlash, like the QX-16 IPL it already supported bootable MFM drives and just needed the proper modifications to boot from a CompactFlash instead.

A copy of the disk image with updated system tracks can be downloaded under the Links section.

Instructions for setting up a bootable CF card:

  1. Boot from floppy and run hdpart
    1. Create new partition
    2. Mark it as bootable with “Change Bootable”
  2. Reboot (again from floppy) and run cfformat.
  3. Run copydisk
    1. Select Copy -> System
    2. Choose Hard Disk as destination drive
    3. Select Start Copy to copy system tracks and cpm2.sys to Compact Flash
    4. Now exit copydisk
  4. Now copy over setup.com to your compact flash (pip c:setup.com=setup.com)
  5. Now remove your floppy disk and reboot

If everything worked you should boot up off the CompactFlash card. The first boot will complain about bad sectors on drive A since you don’t have a floppy disk in the drive, but you can press enter several times to eventually drop to the CLI. Then just change to drive C and run setup to remap your drive assignments so A and B point to your two hard drives, and C/D point to your floppies. Future boots should now work without error.