Update. Turns out the floppy drive does work. I was able to boot the Dos 4.01 install floppies I have. I was able to partially install it but when it was trying to read from the cf card it had a read error. This has been confirmed by exiting to the prompt during install manually formatting the drive and copying the floppy content over. All that worked. When I try to read/boot from the cf card I get all sorts of read errors. So I'm still in search of known good cf cards and adapters.

Thank you

Try a different brand card. Sandisk or Transcend (their industrial series). Kingston might be OK too. I've noticed that some HDD controller cards are more compatible with CF cards than others, which is odd considering IDE is pretty much just an address decoder and the whole logic sits on the device. It's almost direct connection to ISA bus. And yet I've had issues with some cards on UMC controller, and almost none on popular Prime 2C. The BIOS on your mobo might have some issues too, especially with cards that identify as removable, non-magnetic media.

Deunan wrote on 2025-06-28, 23:49:

Try a different brand card. Sandisk or Transcend (their industrial series). Kingston might be OK too. I've noticed that some HDD controller cards are more compatible with CF cards than others, which is odd considering IDE is pretty much just an address decoder and the whole logic sits on the device. It's almost direct connection to ISA bus. And yet I've had issues with some cards on UMC controller, and almost none on popular Prime 2C. The BIOS on your mobo might have some issues too, especially with cards that identify as removable, non-magnetic media.

Thank you for the reply. I found a Sandisk Industrial 256mb(I was also told the size could be a factor) on Ebay. Hopefully that will work.