I bought a cheap ide-cf adapter and a 2.5 seagate ST1 on ebay.

Im using a 386, the bios autodetects the disk as 2385mb (4845 Cyln, 16 Head, 65535 WPcom, 4845 L/Zone, Sect 63, Size 2385MB).

I thought I was on easy street but whenever I try to run Fdisk the machine locks up, it will go to the first screen but whenever I choose an option the machine freezez, I can ctrl+alt+del.

Any suggestions?

Does the CF card still supports CHS ?

Stick it into a modern PC (as long as it has an IDE port), boot from DOS 6.22 (floppy, USB floppy or USB stick) and try to FDISK it from that machine...

Okay, Im using the bios format utility, its halfway through looks like its going to take about half an hour, this might help......

I'll try and format in another machine, im using a windows 95 boot disk off bootdisk.com, Ive also tried dos 6.22.

Its all cool, I left the computer for an hour to do that format thing and it was up to cyln 550, it must've started re-formatting the disk again after reaching 4845 cyln??? anyway I stopped that and changed another bios option, under "Advanced Cmos Setup", "Hard Disk Type 47 Ram Area". "The choice "0:300" is reccomended for most cases. However, if the system is involved with Novell Netware, choose "Dos 1kb" to avoid conflicts with dos. (Novell uses 0:300 for operation system programming". I set the option to "Dos 1kb".

Got windows 95 installing now, ill changed that bios setting back to default to see if it still boots, otherwise the bios hard disk format might have done the trick.

I have a SanDisk Extreme III 8 GB that I tried using to test the first adapters to arrive so far. It hasn't been working so I guess this one is too slow, like what aitotat described.

I figured the model was recent enough that it would have decent capabilities. However, looking into it further, SanDisk made 2 models. One at 20MB/s, the other at 30MB/s. I don't see a model number on it to identify the card. What I do see reads BB08096AT which, from googling, people have thought this indicates the card is a fake.

Anyway, what speed is sufficient for running an operating system on a CF card?

The CF cards I bought are called "memorette". There are images in the "Just bought new Retro hardware" thread. I have 1 with 4GB and 2 with 2 GB.

They look like this: http://cgi.ebay.com.au/8GB-8-GB-G-CF-Card-Com … =item335f04f081

I had W98SE installed once for testing two Voodoo 2 card and that worked fine. But I have been told that for Windows a HDD is better. I would likely source a notebook HDD if I was building a windows machine.