After some time fiddling around with settings, different cards and being on the borderline of hair ripping I found that I was having some quite strange issues with my CF adaptor used in place of the hard drive.

I was planning on setting my 486 machine up with mostly original hardware excluding a mechanical hard drive, but I hit a road block of sorts. First I had issues getting BIOS to even see that cards, but I fixed that by touching it, as is standard with old machines. I touched it and now it magically works. 😕 Actually I think the cards weren't inserting all the way in when it was mounted to the back of the case, so now it just dangles inside.

After solving that first hurdle BIOS detected all three 4GB cards perfectly every time and they all booted into DOS, running OnTrack Disk Manager worked flawlessly and split the drive into two partitions. After installing DOS and drivers using Phils DOS pack it was all working fine, except for the CD-ROM drive. The CF adaptor is my master drive with the jumper set as such and the CD-ROM is a slave where the CF adaptor is plugged into the end of the cable and the CD-ROM is the second. With that setup I could not get the driver to detect a CD-ROM at all. I've tried swapping the order around, cable select on the CD-ROM, but none of that worked. That wasn't the only issue though.

Proceeding further for some reason even though I would have no optical drive I decided to install my AWE 64 Gold using the drivers provided on Creative's website, after copying them to some disks and installing all I got was this lousy error. I can't remember the error exactly, something like error code 2880 line 7 more numbers and I couldn't find anything about it. I tried downloading the files again and used new disks this time just in case mine happened to have corrupted themselves (they're also new), but the exact same error again.

It is at this point I decided stuff it I'll just use a 120GB overkill drive and use OnTrack to limited it to 2GB. BIOS detected this drive as an 8GB drive and OnTrack decided it was far too large and manly to use in DOS so it had to take some of that away, I say whatever to that since 2GB is more than enough for my needs in DOS. So now I have a working 486 with a 2GB hard drive and CD-ROM and booting into DOS like it's 1992 again (or was it 3). My machine is working so I decided to try the AWE 64 again and holly crap nothing happened, the drivers installed like they should have and the cards working great.

Question is, what the hell was up with the CF adaptor borking my setup? Is it just that adaptor (a cheap one from eBay) or have they been known to cause peculiar issues like this?