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Will Cisco router CF cards boot a DOS machine?

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First post, by Standard Def Steve

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Have any of you guys used one of these cheap Cisco CF cards:
https://www.ebay.ca/itm/CISCO-512MB-CF-MEM180 … bmeaU:rk:2:pf:0
as a primary, bootable storage device in a DOS machine? The reason I ask is, apparently not all CF cards are bootable. The last card I bought, a Transcend, would not boot my 486 or P4 test machine, even though MS-DOS Setup detected it as a hard drive and successfully copied files to it.

Thanks

Last edited by Standard Def Steve on 2019-02-24, 06:54. Edited 1 time in total.

94 MHz NEC VR4300 | SGI Reality CoPro | 8MB RDRAM | Each game gets its own SSD - nooice!

Reply 2 of 4, by Jo22

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That's a good idea. Note that DOS 6.x and DOS 7.x behave different with that command.
See "Notes on FDISK": https://thestarman.pcministry.com/asm/mbr/FDISK.htm

I once had a similar looking issue with Linux. After I finished testing a flavour of it, I deleted the drive and did a reformat, but DOS/Win98 couldn't boot from it anymore.
The boot manager of the day (Lilo ?) apparently infested track 0, which I was unable to overwrite with the on-board tools of these OSes.
Later on, I found several disk wipers, especially S0Kill (DOS) that helped me to repair the HDD.

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Reply 3 of 4, by Standard Def Steve

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PTherapist wrote:

Did you try doing:

fdisk /mbr

and it still wouldn't boot?

Yep, tried that with two different versions of fdisk: DOS 6.22 and Win98SE.
Also tried ATCFWCHG.COM and another small utility (the name escapes me) to try and switch the CF card into fixed disk mode. No luck, of course. 😒

Jo22 wrote:

I once had a similar looking issue with Linux. After I finished testing a flavour of it, I deleted the drive and did a reformat, but DOS/Win98 couldn't boot from it anymore.
The boot manager of the day (Lilo ?) apparently infested track 0, which I was unable to overwrite with the on-board tools of these OSes.
Later on, I found several disk wipers, especially S0Kill (DOS) that helped me to repair the HDD.

Thanks for the suggestion. I will definitely try SOKill tomorrow and let you know how it goes!

94 MHz NEC VR4300 | SGI Reality CoPro | 8MB RDRAM | Each game gets its own SSD - nooice!

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