Auto-detect and LBA would be the correct way if there only is LBA and NORMAL, but no LARGE. If that does not work (i.e. it's no longer booting), then you need to re-partition and re-format it. It was probably set up differently before.

You can not use NORMAL, as that is limited to 504 MiB (CHS 1024/16/63).

You get error (20) because you don't use the auto-detected values. That's required for LBA, as the translation does not work otherwise. You can only use CHS values that are supported by the translation of the drive and it most likely does not translate to 64 heads.

Okay, thanks. The strange thing is that I somehow set it up in the past with those parameters that are different from the auto detect values. I have no problem in reformatting the drive, but it would be a shame to do it for nothing.

To be clear: the bios also has a LARGE setting, but somehow I got it working in the past with the settings I posted above. I don’t remember exactly why (it was a while ago) but I remember that the BIOS insists on selecting more then 1023 cylinders with auto detect and LBA. I can also select LARGE, but is it possible that my HDD doesn’t support those parameters or that mode? (it is a 30-odd GB IBM hdd with the limit-to-2GB jumper set)

digistorm wrote on 2020-03-04, 15:05:

but I remember that the BIOS insists on selecting more then 1023 cylinders with auto detect and LBA

That's no problem at all, as the whole point of LBA is to translate CHS values to consecutive numbers. This is done by the BIOS, so the values coming from the drive must be used. Since DOS uses the BIOS for hard disk access, it will not run into any issues. The BIOS takes care of the correct translation.

If there is LARGE, you can use that as well (limit is 8 GB, CHS 1024/256/63). I mostly had trouble with the LARGE setting even on early Pentium mainboards however, so I normally avoid it. But whatever you settle on, you need to FDISK and FORMAT the drive using the new settings.

I tried LBA now with the auto detect function and it will load the bootsector, so I think I'm going to backup my files and repartition the drive with the different paramaters…
But if I may ask: is it possible that this BIOS doesn't properly support HDD's with more than 1023 cylinders? I remember I read something like that on this forum. Because I had a lot of trouble getting this drive to boot on this mainboard. It would fdisk and format correctly, but after transferring the system files it would never get past the loading of the bootsector.
The original drive of this system was 540 MB's and I could also put that one back, but it is kind of small to house DOS, Win3.11 and Win95 together with some games and music files.

Okay, I ran into the same problem as the previous time I tried to partition this disk. So I set up my BIOS to autodetect the drive, and it results in this setup:

But when I try to partition the drive, FDISK from Windows 95 sees the drive like it is 8 GB:

and OS/2 Warp, which I used the previous time to partition the drive, doesn't even recognise the drive correctly and refuses to create a partitior or sees only 95 MBs of it.
So previously I "winged" it with the config I posted in the opening post, but now my BIOS give a hard disk failure. Has anybody an idea what I could do to properly setup the drive?

Addition:
I tried setting up two partitions with the NORMAL option in the BIOS, but FDISK only sees 504 MBs of the drive, and when I run the speedsys test I can see speedsys only sees 1023 cylinders of the 16000+.

When using the LBA option after I partitioned the drive with the NORMAL option, FDISK says it sees 8 GB's again, but when I want to add a logical partition it can only be 8 MB's in size. The only way I got this working before was like I did it in the opening post, but after swapping out the CMOS battery the BIOS refuses to continue. This is really weird…