Your Samsung hard drive is too big for your 486 mobo BIOS to detect (it's probably limited to 2GB hard drive size max); this also prevents your DOS boot floppy to properly partition and format the hard drive (the drive parameters are all wrong).

You can either use a drive overlay (somewhat risky), use an external IDE controller that can detect larger hard drives, or use the original hd the 486 came with (if possible).

If you get errors when using FDISK there is some issue with the BIOS hard drive settings or the controller. Do you have any other, smaller driver, to test? Maybe a small CF card with adapter?

the weird thing is that it was working with that samsung hard drive all the time!
also the format and fdisk on the win95 start floppy work (when i start from it) without a problem.

right now i unfortunately don't have a hdd smaller than 2gb handy...

If you have a boot CD drive you can try the FreeDOS disk and use that to partition and format. Just create a FAT16 partition. Maybe then you can install your MS-DOS?

unfortunately the bios does not support boot from cd.
i have created and formatted a partition with the win95 boot floppy and dos still didn't install...

Might be a long shot, but.....

How about getting a HDD and "shrinking" it, so the system thinks that it is a 2 gig or smaller one?
425mb perhaps? (just to be on the safe side)

brostenen wrote:

Might be a long shot, but.....

How about getting a HDD and "shrinking" it, so the system thinks that it is a 2 gig or smaller one?
425mb perhaps? (just to be on the safe side)

you mean like with seagate disk wizard?
doesn't it only support seagate disks?

In my experience Samsung HDDs never last long, so I would say your disk is dying. Unless it works perfectly fine in another computer that is...

nemail wrote:

you mean like with seagate disk wizard?
doesn't it only support seagate disks?

Phil has done a video on youtube, in wich he is using a samsung spinpoint drive, combined with a sata to pata converter.

Seagate SeaTools is the name of that utility!

Worth a shot. You enter the number of sectors with each sector being 512 bytes. So a bit of Maths...

At this point if the drive is bad just go with a CF card with ide adapter as a lot of the drives from the era are pretty flaky to begin with. At least the supports 2gb instead of just 500mb that a lot of of boards are limited to.

nforce4max wrote:

At this point if the drive is bad just go with a CF card with ide adapter as a lot of the drives from the era are pretty flaky to begin with. At least the supports 2gb instead of just 500mb that a lot of of boards are limited to.

+1

And appropriately sized CF card would be faster and easy

1GB cards are fairly cheap which means baking up and OS swapping easy

IDE HDDs are still pretty common and cheap so I would just pop in a < 2GB IDE. That is what I have in 7 out of 8 desktops. #8 has SCSI.

i had a "what in the hell" experience right now, everything is working again.
what i did:
- boot with windows 95 startup floppy
- delete and recreate partition with fdisk with 500mb
- turn computer off and on (if i only restarted at this point, it did NOT work!!)
- boot again with the win 95 startup floppy
- format c:
- turn computer off and on (if i only restarted at this point, it did NOT work!!)
- boot from dos 6.22 install floppy and bang everything installed perfectly and the computer is behaving completely normal again, even after several reboots and power cycles.

WTF???

btw: i dont like the cf-card thing so much, it's just not the same 😀

On the hard drive size, it's recommended not to go higher as 8.4GB if you use a controller with external BIOS support..
Without the BIOS support you won't get higher until 540MB. But 40GB is just insane, most Pentium 1 systems having problems to recognize a full 40GB drive.

It's indeed true (as i read above my post here) that most off these 486 mainboards can't cope with more then 2GB drive natively.

For higher support you would need a bios controlled controller.

hi, 500mb limit is no problem, i always had that limit on this machine.
the problem was that the hdd wasn't accessible at all... while it was accessible before i tried to reinstall DOS 6.22...

i use seagate hdds and seagate disk wizard with DDO for my P1 and P2 box to utilize the whole amount of disk space, that worked perfectly ever since.

nemail wrote:

i had a "what in the hell" experience right now, everything is working again. what i did: - boot with windows 95 startup floppy […]
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i had a "what in the hell" experience right now, everything is working again.
what i did:
- boot with windows 95 startup floppy
- delete and recreate partition with fdisk with 500mb
- turn computer off and on (if i only restarted at this point, it did NOT work!!)
- boot again with the win 95 startup floppy
- format c:
- turn computer off and on (if i only restarted at this point, it did NOT work!!)
- boot from dos 6.22 install floppy and bang everything installed perfectly and the computer is behaving completely normal again, even after several reboots and power cycles.

WTF???

I have seen this before; I've also seen the hard drive "go blank" (all partitions just disappeared) a few weeks or months later in many cases.

I just don't think is a good idea to play Russian Roulette with PC hardware; you're very likely to get burned 😐

nemail wrote:

i use seagate hdds and seagate disk wizard with DDO for my P1 and P2 box to utilize the whole amount of disk space, that worked perfectly ever since.

At the very least do this with the Samsung hard drive as well. Drive Overlay software is preferable to letting the 486 board handle such a large HDD by itself.

When I had a Dx2 back in the late 90's, I used to run a drive overlay on my 800megabyte Quatum Trailblazer.
The computer did not see past those aprox. 425/450 megabyte of diskspace.

Anyway...
On my P1 133 mhz system, I installed a dedicated controllercard, in order to use a 8 gigabyte harddrive.
The mobo's onboard controller just do not want drives larger than 2 gigabyte.
The downside for 486 systems, are that my sollution is a PCI based one, and most 486's do not have PCI.
(Some late system have it, yet they were rare, even in 1995/96)

i have everything backed up so no russian roulette here. so far everything is still working (as many months before)... 😀

didn't try DDO on the 486 yet, don't need more than 500MB of space there...