If it's still activated, ChipAwayVirus is blocking access to boot sector, maybe.
It intercepts FDISK and FORMAT or SYS and prevents them from writing a boot sector.

That's its purpose, after all. Protecting the boot sector from infections.

If you can, try to create the partition on this PC, then do FORMAT or SYS on another.

Or maybe, you can usr a DOS based Setup Utility and disable ChipAwayVirus from there?

Alternatively, you can check the ChipAwayVirus diskette that came with your mainboard.
It maybe has special utilities included to cope with its cousin stored in BIOS.

Good luck! 🙂🤞

Edit: Just to be sure, did you set the C partition as "active" in FDISK?
It's a common mistake that can be overseen.

Edit: You can use IDEDIAG etc. to get official drive geometry.
Re: IDE disk-on-module + 386

Some 386 BIOSes also feature an HDD detection in Setup.

william9 wrote on 2023-03-29, 19:51:

I can install MS-DOS or FreeDOS, they will not boot.

Which means what, exactly? Is there a message that disk is not bootable (or has no system) or does it hang?
In the first case FDISK /MBR should fix it, if the BIOS lockout on writing to boot sector has been disabled. The second case is most likely the effect of formatting the disk using LBA on newer mobo instead of CHS. Although if you can access other files then perhaps booting from a floppy on the target system and doing SYS to the HDD would fix it.

I installed Dos 5.0 with that laptop also so unfortunately that Trend ChipAwayVirus can't be the problem. Partition was made active.

Both the Asus A7V133-C and that laptop autodetect the drive with same CHS values, 42MB, Cylinders 791, Heads 3 and Sectors 35. I'll try IDEDIAG later to see what it says. I can find the 20MB JVc drive specs online that Toshiba used in T1200XE but unfortunately not for this 40MB version.

I do have Compaq LTE 5100 as one last option but unfortunately the diskette drive has one damaged/misaligned drive head so I would't be able to install anything with it at the moment.

When trying to boot MS-DOS just sits on a black screen and/or blinking text cursor. Last thing I have done at the moment is running SYS command from FreeDOS 1.2 Lite, now when trying to boot all I get is message "Error!" which is not very informative.

WhenI was trying XFDisk or similar from Ultimate Boot CD I installed some kind of a boot manager, when that was installed the boot manager did comd up but it didn't actually boot into anything after pressing Enter, however I don't think I even configured it properly, I only made menu entry but perhaps something else should have been after that...the drive apparently is accessed during boot, it just doesn't boot.

Do note that trying to SYS a disk from different OS than what was installed can sometimes have unpredictable results. This is because the loader code in first sector is not always updated properly and that can lead to OS files not being read correctly on boot.

I'm assuming you don't much care for the files on that HDD and it can be reformatted freely? In that case try FORMAT /Q /S from both FreeDOS and MS-DOS. And FDISK /MBR afterwards if it fails to boot (always from the system used to format). And do check that ChipAwayVirus thing, if it's not being auto-reenabled after a few resets (never seen that happen but then again I only have one or two mobos that have it).

With just format (not full OS install) you'll only get the OS kernel files and COMMAND.COM, nothing will be trying to enter HMA or load any early drivers. Maybe that will work.

Yes files have been gone long ago.

I have tried formatting with Microsoft's fdisk, FreeDos fdisk and Ubuntu's Gparted.
Just moments ago I executed dd to write zeros to the drive, apparently it completed without issues, I then created FAT partitions using Gparted, after this I haven't tried instaling anything.

Problem with that Asus board is that I don't own standard desktop floppy and cd/dvd drives and the board has lots of troubles booting from USB stick so my only option is to use CF to IDE adapter and card.

I discovered linux operating system named KolibriOS which is apparently quite small in terms of hdd requirements and I will probably try if I can install and boot it. Even though I can create and delete files from that JVC drive and even if I did boot from it couple days ago I'm not ready to say that it is functional before I reinstall something and succesfully boot from it.

I don't like mixing Linux and DOS, certainly not a modern Linux. In general all 32+ bit OSes will try to use LBA natively and any partition made with their tools will also store LBA values in the partition table, not CHS. So just because the BIOS detects and uses this HDD as CHS doesn't mean the OS with its HAL drivers will do so as well.
Preferably stick to old DOS software for making paritions and formatting. New OSes can be used for DD wipe, surface scan, 1:1 dump/copy, etc. It all depends how badly you want that disk to work - you might want to "invest" into a 1.44 floppy drive and a couple of floppies, or maybe some floppy emulator like Gotek. That's not to say it can't be done otherwise but you have a problem and booting from floppy drive might help solve it - at some point it might even be cheaper then your time spent trying different things. Assuming of course it's not the HDD fault somehow.

Yeah, it probably would be thr best to have other hardware from similar era as well...

I googled that apparently Toshiba T2000 has this same drive (JD-E2850P) as option and technical data was listed on its manual:

Well, this is solved and I guess I learned something. Asus A7V133-C and that noname Pentium MMX 166 laptop (normally running Win 98) were too new to correctly use this drive, but Compaq LTe 5100 had no problems formatting this correctly and booting from it.