There are a few things you can do.

The first thing to be aware of is that since the BIOS is so old, if you enable anything that causes it to do an ATA IDENTIFY on each boot, it may lock up. Autodetect is an obvious example, but automatic PIO mode setting, LBA, and block mode/multi sector mode are other settings that can cause it to attempt that. So disable those, if present.

One option is to set the maximum size without translation - 1024 cylinders, 16 heads, 63 sectors per track, 1024 landing zone, and 65535 (or none) for write precomp, and just live with being limited to 504 MB. On a MS-DOS 6.22 + Windows 3.1 system that was plenty.

The next level up is to try translation software as you are. I'm not sure why you are getting that error, but I wonder if you are trying it without setting up the drive in the BIOS at all.

Beyond that, you could put XT-IDE Universal BIOS as an option ROM on an ethernet card and permanently bypass this issue. Your BIOS support for IDE drives would go into hibernation since XT-IDE would take over on each boot.

I would be happy even with as little as 120 megabytes, (what my old hard drive was), but seemingly everything that I try results in failure. I went to the bios and tried 1024 cylinders, 16 heads, 63 sectors per track, 1024 landing zone, and 65535 for Wpcom, but still none of the things that I try seem to work. In Ontrack I get the same error, in the MSDOS installer it says that the hard drive is not suitable for installation, and when booting to a live MSDOS disk, trying to read C: results in the message "Invalid drive specification". I have tried a few different combinations in the bios, which only supports manually entering the hard drive information, or selecting a preset, and I can always get the computer past the point where the HD controller fails during boot, but I have not gotten any further. I looked into XT-IDE Universal BIOS, but I do not have a network card, and I would prefer not getting one due to price constraints.

The drive I am trying to use is 16383/16/63, but does not work with those values entered in the bios either, though the drive works perfectly on a different machine. I also verified that the software is definitely working accidentally when I tried my only other IDE hard drive, and I got as far as installing windows 3.1, when the drive blew up (It was very, very old, and barely hanging on). I would love to buy one of these old drives as well, but they seem to be rare everywhere I look, not to mention how unreliable they probably are now days. I still intend to get this computer working even if it is not with this drive, but I don't want to purchase a drive that will have the same problems as the one I have been using.

What does fdisk say when you've configured as 1024/16/63?

No partitions defined, and no partitions to make active. when selecting create new partition, the computer restarts, and nothing has changed, regardless of the option chosen.

That's strange. If I were in your position I would boot linux (e.g., the Slackware 3.9 IDE boot disk) and mess with the HDD from Linux to make sure I can read/write to it so that it isn't a hardware issue, and that the MBR is wiped, but I don't know if you have that background.

I can do that, what version of linux do you recommend? I have never used linux from this era, I have only ever used more modern versions like ubuntu

I also am not sure where to find a floppy disk image for Slackware 3.9, a quick search only revealed old websites that do not have download links

Slackware 3.9 boot floppy (bare.i) - https://mirrors.slackware.com/slackware/slack … dsks.144/bare.i
IDE disks will be /dev/hda in this era not /dev/sda
dd, fdisk, etc all familiar stuff should be there

I have tested the hard drive and verified that it works, my windows 2000 machine will happily install windows 2000, windows 98, and windows 85 to it, and my gate way 2000 will boot from it

But we don't know if it is some weird electrical incompatibility between your motherboard and that drive, or some hardware configuration issue (like maybe you're using Cable Select instead of Master with an old ribbon cable), or a BIOS compatibility issue. Since DOS goes through the BIOS and Linux doesn't, testing with that boot disk will confirm that it's the BIOS if everything works. And it won't hurt to wipe the partition table and get all the modern stuff like leftover FAT32 partitions wiped away.

Im not sure what to do with the bare.i file, I cannot write it to a disk, is there a .img or .ima

It's a raw image. Maybe your software will let you rename it to .img and then do the right hting. Otherwise, if you're on linux you could write it to the /dev node for your floppy drive using dd, or on Windows you need something like rawritent

I am booted into Slackware Linux now on the Dell precision, how do I verify the HD works

As it boots up you should see ide0 and hda: messages regarding the drive; look for errors or any other commentary of the drive or just take a picture; use Shift+PgUp if you need to scroll up

Login as root

dd if=/dev/hda of=/dev/null bs=1024 count=1024 to attempt to read the first MB of the drive (shouldn't get errors)

fdisk -l /dev/hda to look at the partition table

dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/hda bs=1024 count=1024 to wipe the first MB of the drive

fdisk -l /dev/hda again and it should be blank

I want to make sure I am typing this in at the right prompt. the disk boots, asks if you want to put in additional parameters (which I assume I do not), then it loads the ram disk, writes it to the designated ram disk, and then sits forever. do I type in the commands you provided then?

It should not hang forever. You have at least 8MB of RAM? It would probably be best to debug this over a retro-oriented discord or IRC (such as #vc or #retrodreams on slashnet)

I have almost 4MB of ram

I see. That might be too little to run that boot disk. Way back in the day (2002), this is what I used on 4MB systems. https://smalllinux.netpedia.net/smalldown.html You need two disks, smboot-0.7.2 and smroot-0.7.2

I am going to try that, but I am also curious, do you know if I could use an IDE to CF adapter on this computer? that could be the solution to using this hard drive.