If those laptops are "vintage" (perhaps you would care to divulge the specs?), then it is quite possible that 4GB is larger than what the BIOS of those laptops will properly detect. You might have better luck with a 512 MB card.

Hi Jorpho,

The Toshiba is from 1997-1998, Pentium MMX 166MHz, 32+32MB EDO RAM, it was factory fitted with a 2GB HDD. The IBM one is made in mid 1998 and uses the same platform albeit with a 233MHz processor, it came with a 4GB HDD.
Formatting the card in FAT16 doesn't change anything.

Note that this forum is for Windows *games* on modern systems. Ask old hardware questions in Marvin.

Have you tried fdisk /mbr?

I've totally missed the hardware section, my bad. Can a mod move the thread? 😢

@jesolo
I can't get FDISK to recognize it, I formatted it to FAT w. MBR using Easeus under Windows 10.

+
Upon further research the card recognizes itself as a removable device and is so far unusable. I have to find an IDE equipped PC and try the .COM utility.

martin2395 wrote:

I can't get FDISK to recognize it, I formatted it to FAT w. MBR using Easeus under Windows 10.

"fdisk /mbr" is a specific means of running fdisk. It might work even if fdisk does not normally recognize the disk.

Upon further research the card recognizes itself as a removable device and is so far unusable. I have to find an IDE equipped PC and try the .COM utility.

I don't understand.

When I plug the CF card into my (modern) PC the card is being recognized as "Removable device". From what I've read on the web to be usable as a system disk it must be set to fixed by changing some bits.
I've found the utlity made by SanDisk that can do it but I need a PC with a native IDE controller for it and a bootable DOS CD/USB stick etc.

Hello Martin, that utility you mention is quite old I believe.
I think it was made for SanDisk's own line of CF cards from 15 years ago or so.
Besides, it doesn't really change anything except for a single bit, which neither DOS or Windows 9x do care for.
So unless you're trying to install Win XP, everything is just fine the way it is.

If you really need a fixed-media CF card, keep looking for an "industrial" type.
They can often be found for cheap with smaller capacity in places like eBay, etc.
But from a personal experience I can tell you that every CF card that I got so far was bootable under DOS.

I also noticed in the picture above that your FAT16 partition has a size of about 4GB.
As far as I know, Windows NT 3.x and 4.x where one of the few OSes that did support that.
MS-DOS usually doesn't support anything larger than 2GB per partition (FAT16) by default.

If nothing helps, I would try to wipe track 0 from that card. This can easily be done on Linux (link)
On Windows, CCleaner has the ability to do this, while it is over-writing the entire card.
But I guess it's okay to let it only progress for a few percent. Then track zero should be gone and you could abbort the wiping.
After that, I'd try to create a MBR-style FAT partition using MS-DOS on the vintage computers themselves (fdisk, as said).
That way, the drive geometry should be set correctly (or at least set in a way it matches the CMOS).

Edit: The behavior of your laptop ("of which the screen stays black (not even lit)") is a bad sign - perhaps caused by a short-circuit..
Please make sure the pins of the adapter/card are properly connected, some adapters do work upside-down.

Well, the card is also quite old (the original Ultra, 30MB/s) and so I thought I'd give that utility a go.
The Toshiba eventually booted but said that there was no drive installed (same story as with the IBM).

I am familiar with CCleaner, is it the "Drive Wiper" option it has?

The adapter can't be inserted upside down in the toshiba because it has the missing pin indicator.

I've managed to get it working on the Toshiba but using a Sandisk Extreme III 8GB!
Tweaked some boot priority options and suddenly it worked.

Should I disable the swap file on Win 98 or not? The read/write speeds are around 7,7MB/s and 5,4MB/s peak. I think the controller would be the bottleneck here? The original HDD reported itself as using Multiword DMA 2.

martin2395 wrote:

I am familiar with CCleaner, is it the "Drive Wiper" option it has?

Yes, that's the one (complete erase setting).

martin2395 wrote:

The adapter can't be inserted upside down in the toshiba because it has the missing pin indicator.

Ah okay. My 44pin adapter can be inserted both ways, that's way I mentioned it.

martin2395 wrote:

I've managed to get it working on the Toshiba but using a Sandisk Extreme III 8GB!
Tweaked some boot priority options and suddenly it worked.

Good, glad it worked! 😀

martin2395 wrote:

Should I disable the swap file on Win 98 or not?

That's a tricky question. If you don't need it, just disable it.
I have it left enabled, for example, as it is required for Win32s to work in Win 3.1.
It also depends on your CF card. Some cards behave "jerky" if they are told to write when they are busy.
MS says SSDs do work fine with swap files (read here). Well, at least in respect of Windows Seven. The internet isn't sure about that.
Lot's of contradictory statements out there..

martin2395 wrote:

The read/write speeds are around 7,7MB/s and 5,4MB/s peak. I think the controller would be the bottleneck here? The original HDD reported itself as using Multiword DMA 2.

Well, my 286 has a throughput of about 16MB/s (ISA bus) and can do at least ~4MB/s in PIO mode 0. 😉
I think your controller should be able to be faster (the card also). Try to enable Multi-Word DMA in the Win98 Control Panel.
I could be wrong, but I believbe an "enable DMA" checkbox is loacted somwhere in System/Device Manager
under hard disk settings or IDE/ST506 controller settings. Also make sure your adapter supports DMA.

Here's a chart about ATA/IDE/EIDE transfer modes:
https://www.phildev.net/ata-modes.html

Hmm, there is no DMA option available for me in the device manager.
The adapter should have DMA as it looks exactly the same as this one: http://lowendmac.com/wp-content/uploads/cf-to-ide-2.5.jpg only mine says "CF-IDE 2.5" MADE IN TAIWAN".
I also had it under Windows 10 through an IDE-SATA adapter and the cards did reach around 25-30MB/s.

I've installed the unofficial SP3 for Windows 98SE which should add DMA support (at least, it claims to) and my transfer speeds changed only a bit.
My Win98 now has the task manager showing processor usage and It didn't go past 4-7% when benchmarking the disk so I suppose the disk isn't running in PIO mode.

Before the patch:

And after:

Hmm, yes, both the adapter and the benchmark results do look fine to me, too.

I've also found two websites about DMA in Win9x.
They explain how to manually enable it.

http://www.helpwithwindows.com/windows98/tune-35.html
http://smallvoid.com/article/win9x-ide-dma.html

The checkbox (if available) is supposed to look like this:

Re: Intel 440BX - Bogging with hard drive activity

The DMA option is simply not there. I also removed the CD drive to see if it could cause any conflict as AFAIK it's on the same IDE bus but there was 0 difference.
I will check on those articles, thanks.

Good luck! 😀