when you get the "missing operating system" message...
Try booting from a floppy... a bootable floppy. verify the C-drive is found...
and report back.

Did that with a DOS 5 disk
F3 out of the installation program, fdisk and no fixed disk present.

I think your drive is there and formatted, but not bootable.

With that last card in, have a bootable Dos floppy in, boot from that (via the xtide menu), once it has booted from floppy verify you can see c:, then from a: do a "sys c:".

I think you have got the partition and data there, but it's just not bootable. You can't just copy ibmbio and associated system files, they have to be in a particular location on the fat table - sys does that for you, but a simple copy doesn't.

Murugan wrote on 2021-02-28, 17:50:

Did that with a DOS 5 disk
F3 out of the installation program, fdisk and no fixed disk present.

What cards are present in the computer beside the xt-cf-lite and videocard ? And does the motherboard have any integrated peripherals ?

Only the floppy controller and a parallel/serial card.

I'll do as you suggested megatron thx.
You 'd expect that cloning is really 100% a clone.

Murugan wrote on 2021-02-28, 18:16:

Only the floppy controller and a parallel/serial card.

I'll do as you suggested megatron thx.
You 'd expect that cloning is really 100% a clone.

Have you tried taking a working XT-CF lite card out of one of your other computers and sticking it into the computer that is giving you trouble ?

the megatron suggestion is identical to mine. if fdisk doesn't see your hard drive, there is no clear and direct way for you to get any system files on the CF card for it to boot from.
If fdisk did see your drive I would've suggested you do a 'format C: /S' or a 'SYS C:' but since fdisk doesn't see your hard drive or CF card then neither of those will function.

Two of my 3 cards that came with the other CF lite work.

are the CF cards all the same size ?

1 is 256mb so the same size and one is 128mb with a like 60mb partition.

Murugan wrote on 2021-02-26, 16:02:

I can make an image and write it to the card,i can access the card in my desktop but in the xt it says missing operating system.

I've looked up how to flash it but I seem to postpone it 😀

You really should try flashing the firmware. The version you are using is ancient

Can't You create Dos install disks from images and install Dos from there that way. It was quite a long while ago I did this but seem
to remember using 720k DS DD disks as XT's usually don't support 1.44mb floppies.
You may be able to format a 1.44 as a 720.

Another thought might be to see if You can mount the CF card in Dosbox somehow and install there, but I have no idea if that is
possible.
Virtual machine another idea.

If the PC doesn't see a HD you can't install it there.
I used Oracle VM to create my DOS CF.
As an experiment, I tried the card I made in another CF lite with 'newer' BIOS and it works!
So the problem will probably indeed be the ancient BIOS on this one.
I looked at some tutorials, made a DOS bootdisk with the latest firmware on for the XT CF and selecting autoconfigure in the menu said 'no controller found'
Now in a YT video, some guy says this option doesn't always work so I guess you need to do it manually. This project has taken too much time for now and weather is great here so for now this goes on hold.