First post, by Galacnor
Hey guys,
Long time no see!
It's been a number of years since I've been active due to my university studies; however, I've recently been trying to get a 486 system up and running during my semester break and have been having some hard luck with a Compact Flash adaptor that I am trying to make work in place of the original 200 odd megabyte hard-drive, which blew what I think was a filter capacitor as soon as I turned the computer on after about 20 years in storage.
Everything started off going reasonably well. The motherboard (an Asus? ISA-486) is equipped with an American Megatrends Bios (version 40-0108-001292-00101111-050591-SIS-486-F) which contains no auto detection feature for hard disks.
Because of this, I threw the compact flash inside my 386 system with a similar American Megatrends Bios which is equipped with an auto detect feature, and used this to get the information for my compact flash card's "geometry".
For good measure I checked it against the info provided by IDEINFO.EXE. The information was a perfect match.
After doing this I attempted to format the card from within the DOS 6.22 setup utility without success. (It tries to format, reaches 100% and then claims dos can't be installed)
Please excuse the German version of DOS 6.22. This was my father in law's machine originally and he's a native German speaker, hence the system has a German keyboard chip and functions best with the localized edition of DOS.
When this didn't work I tried formating it with both fdisk and xfdisk, neither of which were able to help me solve my problem.
Under fdisk, after trying to delete the partition and reformat it manually, the program essentially hangs under options menu 1, showing no drive to create a partition on.
Under xfdisk, the program sees the CF card but then, after attempting a format, reaches 100% then says it was unable to create a boot sector and fails
After this circus I expected that the CF adapter might be bad so I switched in a known good one from my 386 system with the same results using that adaptor. Leading me to believe the adaptor is not the issue here.
I have not tried a different CF card, as I only have one of an appropriate capacity (256mb); but, I doubt the card is the issue, as it's detected correctly on my 386 and under IDEINFO.
I'm led to believe by this behavior that there's some kind of Bios problem here but can't seem to figure out what it is or how to fix it.
Anyone have any ideas?
Thanks I advance!
Alex
