Chances are that your 286 BIOS doesn't support hard drive capacities that high or, that the translation of the settings you captured is not correct.
Try inserting the CF card (with it's adapter) in a later PC (like a Pentium PC) that has a BIOS that can auto detect the CF settings.
Write down the CHS parameters (not LBA) and try those settings on your 286 BIOS.
Otherwise, you could try selecting a lower capacity that is in your 286 BIOS (like 40MB) and see what happens (in other words, "tell" the PC you only have a 40 MB hard drive).

What I have also picked up is that certain CF to IDE adapters don't play nice on older PC's, particularly those ones with the female connector on the adapter (these are the ones that you would normally plug directly into the IDE controller card).
I've found that the ones with the bracket (i.e., with the male connector, which are the ones that you have to connect with an IDE cable, just like you would do with a normal hard drive ) works much better.

jesolo wrote:

Chances are that your 286 BIOS doesn't support hard drive capacities that high or, that the translation of the settings you inse […]
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Chances are that your 286 BIOS doesn't support hard drive capacities that high or, that the translation of the settings you inserted is not correct.
Try inserting the CF card (with it's adapter) in a later PC (like a Pentium PC) that has a BIOS that can auto detect the CF settings.
Write down the CHS parameters (not LBA) and try those settings on your 286 BIOS.
Otherwise, you could try inserting a lower capacity that is on your 286 BIOS (like 40MB) and see what happens.

I was able to configure and boot successfully from a 200MB WD HDD, so he size is not an issue. But I will try to connect it to another computer with auto-detect capability.
I tried getting the card information from a linux VM with a usb adapter, but it claims to have 255 HEADS, while the BIOS support only 64...

anetanel wrote:

I tried getting the card information from a linux VM with a usb adapter, but it claims to have 255 HEADS, while the BIOS support only 64...

It's probably giving you the LBA parameters.
With Auto detect BIOSes, you normally get "NORMAL", "CHS" and "LBA" parameters.
Most BIOSes from that era are limited to 1024 cylinders, 16 heads & 63 sectors, which will give you 528 MB or 504 MiB max.
So, make sure you stay within those parameters.

What does your CF to IDE adapter look like?

jesolo wrote:

What does your CF to IDE adapter look like?

Pretty sure it is this one:

Check with FDISK that your partition is active.

Cyberdyne wrote:

Check with FDISK that your partition is active.

Thanks. It is.

Boot from a floppy and run the attached utility to id the card's parameters on the very same machine

For a 128 MB flash card, the CHS is most likely 500/16/32.

konc wrote:

Boot from a floppy and run the attached utility to id the card's parameters on the very same machine

IDEINFO.ZIP

That a cool tool.
I managed to get with it the (seemingly) correct CHS parameters (978/8/32), but the result is the same...
I removed the partitions, recreated one active partition, formatted it and transferred the system files from a DOS 5 diskette (sys a: c:), but it acts the same: blinking cursor after POST.
Tried again installing DOS 6.22 from the 3 diskettes, and this time didn't get a boot-loop, but the same behavior as above.

Could be just incompatibe CF card.

After installing DOS, try the following: boot from disk 1 again and press F5 when "Starting MS-DOS..." appears. Now type "fdisk /mbr" and reboot.