To take a wild guess: have you tried booting from a floppy and then running format.com from there?

Jorpho wrote on 2020-09-23, 15:15:

To take a wild guess: have you tried booting from a floppy and then running format.com from there?

No, I don't have a DOS boot disk. Should I make one and try it?
Can I use a dos 6.22 floppy boot or should I stick to 5.0?

if your just formatting the hard disk it doesn't matter what version the boot disk is.
If you want to boot from the hard drive after you format it you'll want to use the same dos version as you want to install.
You will also want to tell format to copy system files after the format. so you would type
format c: /u /s

chinny22 wrote on 2020-09-23, 16:16:

if your just formatting the hard disk it doesn't matter what version the boot disk is. If you want to boot from the hard drive a […]
Show full quote

if your just formatting the hard disk it doesn't matter what version the boot disk is.
If you want to boot from the hard drive after you format it you'll want to use the same dos version as you want to install.
You will also want to tell format to copy system files after the format. so you would type
format c: /u /s

oh, it worked.
Installing dos 6.22 now

thank you

Whenever I want to wipe a disk, I use S0kill.
It will remove MBR, PBR etc.
Re: IDE to Compact Flash as MS-DOS boot drive.

That being said, it's a little strange that format does fail so silently.
Perhaps some other things are messed up.
Personally, I'd check things first.
SCANDISK, CHKDSK /F, CheckIt! v3 etc.
Also drive geometry in setup, label on the HDD, run WHATIDE, IDEDIAG for comparison etc.

Re: SD/CF to ide CHS setup

Edit : Never mind. 🙂

Jo22 wrote on 2020-09-23, 16:33:

Whenever I want to wipe a disk, I use S0kill. It will remove MBR, PBR etc. Re: IDE to Compact Flash as MS-DOS boot drive. […]
Show full quote

Whenever I want to wipe a disk, I use S0kill.
It will remove MBR, PBR etc.
Re: IDE to Compact Flash as MS-DOS boot drive.

That being said, it's a little strange that format does fail so silently.
Perhaps some other things are messed up.
Personally, I'd check things first.
SCANDISK, CHKDSK /F, CheckIt! v3 etc.
Also drive geometry in setup, label on the HDD, run WHATIDE, IDEDIAG for comparison etc.

Re: SD/CF to ide CHS setup

Edit : Never mind. 🙂

yeah too late hehe
but I guess something was indeed messed up.

none of my ISA sound cards were working and some mice configurations from the previous owner were giving me errors.
I hope formatting and installing DOS 6.22 will solve those issues.

Steapa wrote on 2020-09-23, 16:54:

none of my ISA sound cards were working and some mice configurations from the previous owner were giving me errors.
I hope formatting and installing DOS 6.22 will solve those issues.

I don't know why you would think that. Any configuration issues would be limited to the contents of autoexec.bat and config.sys.

Moved to Marvin.