dameged?slow format

Try creating the first partition further on in the disk. It might be that the sectors where the FAT is written are bad.

Fdisk is pretty lame, as it won't let you pick custom offsets or create a small dummy primary partition. It might let you make an extended part as partiton 1, I don't remember for sure. If not, use a GPartEd boot CD or something.

In theory, you can also fidget with the FAT table offset by reserving sectors, but I doubt any of the common format tools would let you do that. FAT16 and FAT32 have their customary defaults, and most tools respect that for maximum compatibility. Nonetheless it is possible if a tool will let you do it.

One of these days I really need to write some DOS apps to do all these fancy things which are so common in Linux. I'm spoiled.

So I swapped in a spare 20GB WD hard drive, and the socket 7 system partitioned and formatted it just fine. I also ran a surface scan and reformatted the 4GB drive using a hard drive utility on my Win 10 computer. No problems whatsoever writing a FAT32 partition to the drive.

I just tried the 4GB drive again with the primary and secondary slaves disabled and it worked. Odd.

WD drives can be picky, IME. I had one that would sporadically throw errors and slow down the POST boot process until I got the jumper position right. I don't remember exactly what their deal is, but I think it was that WD has separate Master, Slave, and Single Drive settings, whereas most drives combine Master / Single into one setting.

IIRC, for the Caviar line, you can place the jumper across the bottom row as a neutral setting, which equates to Single Drive. But definitely look up your model specifically to verify.

This particular experience almost convinced me to chuck that disk as a lost cause. It was a 486 motherboard with AMI BIOS and a 3.1GB Caviar drive. The jumper setting was set to Master, it had either a partial drive overlay image or a virus in the MBR that made it lock the PC while beeping the speaker incessantly on boot -- even after fdisk + format /s, and that AMI BIOS had a few different options for LBA and 32-bit access that amounts to a guessing game of which combination DOS will approve of when combined with any given drive. It took several tries before I finally got everything to settle down. I don't ever remember having that much trouble with an IDE disk before. 😉 But maybe SATA just has me spoiled and I've forgotten the good ol' days.