Win98SE FDISK can definitely be buggy with large disks. Have you tried the FDISK replacement from FreeDOS?

I haven't tried that. I'll give it a go now and see.

Are you sure it detects as a 32GB card in BIOS? Got a 16 GB Kingston 266x card that won't detect as more than 8 GB, sometimes only as 4GB, in three different computers with two different BIOS manufacturers. It seems to live its own life, there's no consistency at all. It's working perfectly in USB readers on modern computers. Tried with a few different adapters too, not unexpectedly without success, not much that can go wrong with those. Got no solution to the problem though.

Well, even in the 486 it's listed as CF CARD and ~32000 mb.

The FreeDos FDISK also reports only 8GB total space.

It works at 8GB, almost. It gets general read errors randomly and it basically is a waste of a purchase. Is there any place that lists decent brands and types that are known to work in this configuration?

wallaby wrote:

Well, even in the 486 it's listed as CF CARD and ~32000 mb.

The FreeDos FDISK also reports only 8GB total space.

It works at 8GB, almost. It gets general read errors randomly and it basically is a waste of a purchase. Is there any place that lists decent brands and types that are known to work in this configuration?

Well, there are counterfeit flash cards being sold on Ebay. Besides being of shoddy quality, they sometimes report more storage space than they really have, and once the real flash is filled, they "loop" and starts overwriting the existing data. Might be that you got one of those?

Well, on some of my 486 machines, when I fdisk a larger CF card, it will only do 500 MB. That's a BIOS limitation. 8 GB is another such limit. But then you mention the Windows 10 desktop, now that is just weird.

Yes, Windows 10 has completely abandoned this card. It can see partitions and delete them, but its unable to create them on the card. If it is counterfeit, it's really convincing! I would expect some kind of tell if it was fake, but it looks legitimate. It's UDMA 7. Are there settings in CF cards I should aim for? I suspected a possible BIOS limit of 8GB but it auto-detecting the card as 32GB made me think it maybe it would work.

Oh great. The seller I bought it from has negative feedback with fake CF cards. I never thought to look because there was a lot of positive feedback. And I've already left feedback so I can't even warn them.

Man, sorry to hear. That sucks.

wallaby wrote:

Oh great. The seller I bought it from has negative feedback with fake CF cards. I never thought to look because there was a lot of positive feedback. And I've already left feedback so I can't even warn them.

Remember it might not be the cards fault. For example Kingston says that their CF cards cannot be used for booting operating systems (but I think it is just to prevent people from complaining when it does not work).

So just to double check, you are trying to install DOS 7.1 from Win98SE into 32GB CF card using a 486 machine?

Can you post any more details, like exact CF card type and CHS and LBA parameters and such?
How new 486 is it? Because even if the 486 can detect the drive size as 32GB, it does not mean it supports LBA or geometry translation so it may be limited to ~500MB or ~8GB. With FAT16, you can have 2GB partitions and four partitions, which should be bulletproof even with older DOS like 6.22.

If I had to suggest something, I'd first suggest a smaller card, like up to 8GB CF card first, and getting it to work first. Many PCs may want to translate the geometry differently, so when formatted on one machine it does not work on another. Especially when formatted through USB to CF adapter as it may advertize non-native CHS parameters.

DOS 7.1 supports FAT32, right ?

So why don't just use an old digital camera or one of these photo viewers to format the card ?
That's how I got troublesome cards to work a few times.

These devices to sometimes have their own little OSes, which don't use Windows or Linux specific mechanisms.
I think their behavior is closer to that of a microcontroller based system.
They write only a bare minimum of filesystem/partition data onto the flash card.

Another nice side effect is, that older digicams may use another transfer method than the average PC.
Like memory mode, for example. This could be handy to overcome certain compatibility issues.