Hi all:

I have some news that I believe many of you will find exciting. It has been a long and frustrating road, but today I managed to get a tripper unit and my Dell axim to communicate. I can now copy files to the tripper unit from my digital camera and access those files for viewing on a PDA, edit, rename, move or delete those files. I was also able to get the tripper unit to be seen by my Mac OS, as well as Windows98. I am very pleased to say the least!

The key element in making this possible is a RATOC USB Host Compact flash card. I thought it would be as easy as copying the driver's to the PDA, and simply installing the card, but it was far from that. First off, the host card does not automatically refresh when something is plugged into the PDA. Sometimes, it's a matter of simply pulling the card and reinserting it, while other times the PDA needs to be reset.

Second, the majority of times I attached a device to the host card it would ask me to reformat the media, whether it be a compat flash card or zip drive. In the case of a compat flash card, once the PDA reformatted it, many times it could then not be read by the camera!

When I first attached the tripper unit to to the PDA, it prompted me to reformat the the drive --which which I did. (gulp) I could read the data on the tripper unit just fine, and could also have the tripper unit read a CF card, which I could also see on the PDA. The problem occurred when I tried to hook the tripper unit up to the host computer. The host computer simply did not recognized the tripper! I was not even able to reformat the drive as the main host computer could not see it, and thus not give it a drive letter. You can't format a drive that doesn't exist! Needless to say, I got a sinking feeling--had I just destroy a hundred dollar hard drive?

My saving grace was Pixfer, available at www.glasslantern.com. With this program I was able to zero all the sectors, and then reformat the drive. I was going to pack the RATCO host card up and sent it back-I had enough!

Something in the back of my head told me to try it one more time the following day. While I wasn't going to reformat the drive again if it didn't work, I just wanted to give it one more go. I hate to admitting defeat!

Amazingly, the hard drive was instantly recognized (no format prompt) and I was able to access the full contents. I copied some data from a CF disk over to the tripper, and no problem at all-- it showed up on the hard drive and PDA as well! I then plugged the tripper unit into my Mac, and no problems there either--it showed up on the desktop just like another drive.

This got me thinking as to what the key ingredient was to making this all work.
1). In device Manager, I chose to have the computer look at the tripper as a removable drive. I think this is key to the having the host card adapter identify the drive correctly. Host drives are not supported.

2). I downloaded a driver called exdrive.exe and installed this in the windows PDA folder. This driver supposedly only works for PCMCIA, but it may be responsible for my success as well. I'll post the URL if anyone is interested--I don't have it in front of me at the moment.

3) The wind was from the southwest, and it was Friday. Translation--luck! I really don't know for sure what the magic combination was.

In the end, I'm just very happy this all works, as it was beginning to drive me crazy. Here's hoping others are as lucky at making a combination like this work--It's a sweet set-up, and I just love it!

Happy shooting!

Troy