Can't help you, but I'm intrigued. I don't have any XT-IDE or XTCF devices so no experience with those. Just recently, few days ago, someone posted the same thing happening on a facebook group. All the usual ideas were proposed, yet no actual fix was found. At the moment yours sounds to me like a sort of CHS versus LBA problem.

Here's to hoping someone more knowledgeable posts a solution that fixes it.
Where did you order your XT-CF lites from ?

They come from a Bulgarian seller on Evilbay.
It 'works' with the 2 premade cards but when I want to 'make' one, it goes wrong.

First thing I'd do is update the xtide rom
http://www.xtideuniversalbios.org/binaries/

Make sure you run the configuration utility before you flash it.

Presume you arent only using large (>4Gb) CF cards as have seen people reporting problems with them? If so, might be worth getting a small (1gb or less) card to try if the rom update doesn't help.

Make an Image file of Your working cards then write that onto the non working one.

The cards are 8,32 (both Canon branded) and 256mb.
Going to try Win32diskimager this week,otherwise flashing the newest BIOS is the next step.

Ok.....so I cloned it on a 256mb card. Original it's a 128mb with 60mb partition.
All went seemingly well using Win32diskimager but....again 'missing operating system'.
Getting tired of this.
What am I missing???!!!

I also tried Driveimage xml but when restoring the image, it complained about the drive parameters being different and it gave an error when it wanted to adjust it.

have you tried running fdisk /mbr on the problematic CF cards?

I tried a lot of things...the first times I created the CF in Oracle,the XT hung on C>>C. After doing fdisk /mbr in Oracle again, the XT said missing operating system.

I just cloned a working 256mb card on the 256mb one I want to use but it keeps saying missing OS????

Maybe I am preparing it wrong?
In diskpart W10, I do a clean and then it does't work. Then I create a partition of 244mb since diskpart says it's 244mb (leaving like 245kb unused it seems). I assign a drive letter and format it in FAT.

Two options to go now:
Find some other cf cards
Lend a cf card reader so I can do disk to disk copy with the one in my pc

what kind of CF cards are these? judging from the size they are not the 400x 333x super fast kind that can be problematic in old systems...
weird!

Two from Canon (FC-32m is the 32gb one) and the 256mb says High Speed Microsim

I've had great success with the transcent 133x ones - newer ones that are indeed way faster have issues with older systems - they either take too long to "drop their speed" or plainly do not support slow connections from what I have read and thus you can get all kinds of errors...
Try with a DOS partitioning tool like Partition Magic and see if this helps, I use it all the time and never had an issue - provided the CF is suitable.

Will look into that too.
Didn't expect this to be PITA!

Hmmm, maybe my "help" was bogus.

I have been using my cf-lite that I made myself in an XT machine lately and had similar issues. Dos actually sees the 2gb partition as non-dos so maybe imaging
isn't going to work.
How about just formatting it as FAT only, not fat32. Then just simply copy the files from a working cf card.

I've been updating the games and other files on mine via Windows 10 and a cf card reader .
I just plugged it into my main pc and indeed it is formatted as FAT.

I format it as FAT(16)
Going to put the cloned card in my Oracle VM and try a fdisk /mbr since it doesn't get detected by fdisk in my XT, even though the files are there and visible on my W10 machine.

It must be something with the CF I'm doing wrong.

Murugan,

Are the CF cards that came with the XT-CF lite still working?
Which Cloning software are you using ? if you have access to a linux box all you would have to do would be
insert the working disc, then as root at the shellprompt type

(notice the lack of number at the sdd, and replace the sdd with the correct drive device for your CF card)
dd if=/dev/sdd of=CF.file

then take out the working disc, insert the other disc
(see previous notice)
dd if=CF.file of=/dev/sdd

kinda wish I had one of those XT-CF cards so I could figure out what is being obtuse. 😀 Oh well, something to add to the wishlist.

Driveimage xml and Win32diskimager

win32diskimager should work just fine.... time to delve deeper in this rabbit hole.

How do you feel about updating the XT-CF eeprom ?

I can make an image and write it to the card,i can access the card in my desktop but in the xt it says missing operating system.

I've looked up how to flash it but I seem to postpone it 😀

Tried another cloning program aaaaaaaannnnnddddd......same 🙁
Next try is the program Keropi suggested.