Which size does your CF card have?

I've tried 4 GB and 32 GB cards.

Now I have another problem. Last night I installed Windows 2000 Server. After the first reboot, the BIOS POST now shows that I only have 1 MB of RAM instead of 128 MB. I've tried reseating, no change. I have no idea what's going on with this board, something strange. CPU and cache jumpers all look good.

Looks like you have a patched BIOS on there that should support large drives.

Maybe it's an LBA thing.

Did your mechanical drive run with CHS addressing?

douglar wrote on 2024-06-20, 19:03:

Looks like you have a patched BIOS on there that should support large drives.

Maybe it's an LBA thing.

Did your mechanical drive run with CHS addressing?

Yeah it's the patched 2001 Award BIOS. I was using the mechanical with LBA, it's a 10 GB drive.

I'm sure you would never wrap power cables around your data cables. In that case I'd go with the option that you might have a failing simm.

There are several CF adapters that don't set the cards on slave, no matter what you set. Try a card alone on an IDE as master, see if it gets detected.

Also: have the card geometry detected in bios.

douglar wrote on 2024-06-20, 19:32:

I'm sure you would never wrap power cables around your data cables. In that case I'd go with the option that you might have a failing simm.

Yeah my memory has never been tested in other systems, so I don't know for sure if it's good. The second issue I mentioned with the BIOS suddenly only seeing 1 MB of RAM also kinda points to a memory problem. I'll play around with the RAM tonight and try individual sticks/different sticks.

ux-3 wrote on 2024-06-20, 19:44:

There are several CF adapters that don't set the cards on slave, no matter what you set. Try a card alone on an IDE as master, see if it gets detected.

Also: have the card geometry detected in bios.

That's what I've been doing, one card alone as master. Used two different model adapters, both of which I know work fine on several other motherboards.

I swapped the RAM with new RAM (literally new manufacture, from Memory Masters) and now it posts with a full 128 MB, Windows 2000 Server boots from the mechanical hard disk and works just fine. So I think we're good with the memory here.

But I STILL get a hard disk failure error when trying to use any CF cards! Any other ideas?

Wow okay, I put a different brand CF card on and it worked. It just seems to really hate Sandisk CF cards, whether it's 4 GB or 32 GB!

Is there some feature that these may not support that the BIOS requires? Maybe something that could be fixed by tweaking something in the BIOS?

Does your board run the IDE controller directly into the ISA bus or is there a PCI IDE controller on the board?

I'm assuming you have a UMC UM8663 IO chip if you have one of these boards:
https://theretroweb.com/motherboards/s/shuttl … -hot-433-rev.-1
https://theretroweb.com/motherboards/s/shuttl … ot-433-ver.-1-3
https://theretroweb.com/motherboards/s/shuttl … ot-433-ver.-4.0