1. Often these CF adapters dont like sharing IDE channels with other drives. Try it on its own.
2. Some CF cards are iffy with old motherboards. Try a different CF card.

You mean it's stuck at the drive detection, or it doesn't boot after that?
If it's the first and you're tried the CF as a single drive on the IDE channel like Munx suggested above, what's the size of the CF card? I'm thinking it might be more than the BIOS HDD limit. For certain PIIs even a 16GB card is too large.

konc wrote on 2023-11-07, 11:06:

You mean it's stuck at the drive detection, or it doesn't boot after that?
If it's the first and you're tried the CF as a single drive on the IDE channel like Munx suggested above, what's the size of the CF card? I'm thinking it might be more than the BIOS HDD limit. For certain PIIs even a 16GB card is too large.

I was using a Sandisk Extreme 64GB card, that probably is a tad to big no ?

magestic wrote on 2023-11-07, 23:55:

konc wrote on 2023-11-07, 11:06:

You mean it's stuck at the drive detection, or it doesn't boot after that?
If it's the first and you're tried the CF as a single drive on the IDE channel like Munx suggested above, what's the size of the CF card? I'm thinking it might be more than the BIOS HDD limit. For certain PIIs even a 16GB card is too large.

I was using a Sandisk Extreme 64GB card, that probably is a tad to big no ?

Most probably yes.

I used a Transcend 133x 32 GB CF card for my retro build where I just discovered today that it seems to be not 100% compatible with my system. Windows 98 SE felt like it was working fine, but I got some random kernel32.dll errors here and there. Windows 2000 setup crashed with BSOD directly after booting from CD. Connected a 40 GB IDE HDD and it is working fine. The CF card was detected fine by the BIOS though.

konc wrote on 2023-11-08, 07:54:

magestic wrote on 2023-11-07, 23:55:

konc wrote on 2023-11-07, 11:06:

You mean it's stuck at the drive detection, or it doesn't boot after that?
If it's the first and you're tried the CF as a single drive on the IDE channel like Munx suggested above, what's the size of the CF card? I'm thinking it might be more than the BIOS HDD limit. For certain PIIs even a 16GB card is too large.

I was using a Sandisk Extreme 64GB card, that probably is a tad to big no ?

Most probably yes.

Seconded. According to The Retro Web, your MB was designed in 1997 and the latest BIOS was updated in 1999. The common capacities of HDD back then were between 4.3 and 13 GB; supports of 64 GB HDD from MB / BIOS were not common before 2000.

There were two major capacity limits back in late 1990s: 8.4 and 33.8 GB. To play it safe I'd suggest using CF cards of 8 GB or less.

I now have 3 different adapters, and at least 3 different brands of CF Card all 8 GB or less, I cant get any of these to work. I'm just going to try a 8GB PATA DOM module.

DOS 6.22 recognizes them sorta but fails to properly partition or format DOS crashes , FreeDOS seems to work but wont boot after installing, can't find MBR, says error reading disk.

Mechanical drives work fine with this motherboard.

Transcend 8GB fail
ZHONGSIR 8GB fail
ZHONGSIR 512MB Fail
8GB PATA DOM SSD works

I Ordered a Lexar 8GB to give it one more shot before i give up

Just to be sure, you've run fdisk /mbr on them, right?

konc wrote on 2023-11-24, 07:33:

Just to be sure, you've run fdisk /mbr on them, right?

yes of course ...

magestic wrote on 2023-11-24, 06:09:

Transcend 8GB fail ZHONGSIR 8GB fail ZHONGSIR 512MB Fail 8GB PATA DOM SSD works […]
Show full quote

Transcend 8GB fail
ZHONGSIR 8GB fail
ZHONGSIR 512MB Fail
8GB PATA DOM SSD works

I Ordered a Lexar 8GB to give it one more shot before i give up

In from China, Sandsik 8GB - sorta works

fdisk created a partition of max size = 495,157,284 bytes when 2048mb expected for some reason, other than that i was able to install dos on the CF and boot from it...

i'm giving up.

I also have compatibility issues with my Transcend 8 GB and 32 GB CF cards. On Win 98 they seem to work, but some apps crash randomly and Win 2000 setup dies instantly with BSOD immediately after loading. Real IDE HDD works fine. I've read somewhere that newer CF cards might not implement legacy IO protocol correctly, only modern UDMA. I don't have any older CF cards to test with. Retro computing can be quite a pain sometimes...

technokater wrote on 2023-12-08, 10:41:

I also have compatibility issues with my Transcend 8 GB and 32 GB CF cards. On Win 98 they seem to work, but some apps crash randomly and Win 2000 setup dies instantly with BSOD immediately after loading. Real IDE HDD works fine. I've read somewhere that newer CF cards might not implement legacy IO protocol correctly, only modern UDMA. I don't have any older CF cards to test with. Retro computing can be quite a pain sometimes...

Retro computing was a pain back in the day, event before all the capacitors got old, plastics got brittle, the anachronistic parts from the far future showed up, and floppies filled with pet hair! Actually, the pet hair situation for me was probably worse in the 90's. Anyway... Back in the 90's, maybe you had access to usenet if you were lucky, otherwise, you had to huddle with friends or spend hours on tech support.

What is the make and model of the Real IDE HDD? Do you know if it was using CHS addressing or LBA addressing? The Windows 2000 "crash on boot" issue sounds like the windows 2000 install loses access to your storage when the protected mode drivers loaded. I feel like this could be be an IDE addressing mode issue. Windows 2000 <=SP2 didn't know LBA48 addressing, so if you are running with LBA48, you would see something like you are describing. Safest bet would be to switch everything over to CHS addressing if your BIOS will let you. You would probably lose the ability to access the CF thought USB card readers though, since most of them built in the last 15 years don't speak CHS addressing.

The random crashing under Win98 could be that your master/slave devices don't get along and periodically step on each other's toes when trying to dance. As other postered have said, CF's don't always do master/slave configurations so well. It gets even more difficult if the devices on the IDE cable were built in different centuries. The best bet for getting cooperation is to use two devices from the same time period or to put them on two separate cables.

Thanks for your input. I'm booting Win 2000 SP4 setup CD so that should support LBA-mode, right? The IDE is a Maxtor 40 GB UDMA-6/ATA133 device, so also much newer than the rest of the platform. For the CF card, it's a Transcend TS32GCF133 32 GB. The 8 GB version TS8GCF133 showed the same behaviour. I only have one master device per IDE channel, jumpered correctly, and detected by BIOS. I can check if I can do something about CHS-Adressing. I need to try different CF card too, but I need to buy some first.

i replaced a half-height maxtor 40gb 7200rpm ata133 hdd with a transcend industrial 16gb cf card. it took great pains and a couple of different cf adapters and ide cables to get udma5 mode detected and still the maxtor outperformed the cf card in both read and writes.

If you have a PCI slot available I would suggest to ditch IDE completely for the hard disk (used loosely here) and install a PCI SATA card instead. The SiI3114 based cards work just fine down to Windows 98 (and likely 95 as well) and you won't have any BIOS related size limitation or compatibility issues because the card has its own BIOS that takes care of all that.

The caveat is that the cards usually come with the RAID BIOS so you'd have to flash the "normal" IDE BIOS first (b5500.bin) but it's not a big deal really.

And once you have SATA, SSDs are cheap and plentiful

That's a good point, indeed. Might actually consider doing that.

Getting the right CF Card is key i come to learn, I've had better luck with "SATA To PATA IDE Hard Drive Adapter Converter 2.5/3.5 HDD Parallel to Serial ATA" and Disk on Modules "DOM"

The old gateway 2000 I'm using does have PCI so i have a SATA card arriving to give that a shot.

I'll try to sell all the CF cards and adapters i accumulated since they don't work on this system...

For reference the latest IDE BIOS and flasher utility for the SiI3114 cards can be found inside this archive and it's version 5.5.0.0 (SiI3114_5500.zip -> b5500.bin): http://www.vogonsdrivers.com/getfile.php?fileid=1015

While the latest driver for Windows 98 is version 1.3.10 erroneously marked for Vista and can be downloaded from Delock driver page ("Windows (32 u. 64): 95, 98, Me, NT, 2000, XP, 2003, Vista" "Treiber ohne RAID"). The driver is inside 3114-vista-x86-logo-1.3.10.0.zip inside TreiberoRaid.zip: https://www.delock.com/produkt/70154/merkmale.html?f=s