same as blowing on the video game cartridges; but hours have passed, and found a somewhat messed up solution,
Since I have several retro computers, one recent purchase at a thrift store was a old voicegate PC ; basically rebuilt it in the early months of the pandemic to have a 3.5 , 5.25 and optical drive and installed windows 95 on it as it had a working hard drive.
So months have past, work in food service kept me busy finally had a week off and I decided to have a go at it again,
Seeing how XT-IDE keeps the settings on the CF cards (I have two a Monotech one which doesn't like CF card adapters , and a Glitchworks one which tolerates them) I transferred it over to the voicegate system with a ms-dos 6.22 boot disk and formatted with the /s command switch, as well as sys.com and fdisk /mbr so did that after a test on Voicegate without aid of floppy it worked, this was the industrial CF card.
The retro PC I want to build into is a Cyrix 486 I have, so I moved the Glitchworks XT-IDE over to Cyrix and it booted into MS-DOS.
I know it seems like a fair bit of work doing this but it worked.
The Transcend CF card doesn't really want to format, it goes so far then wants to repair the allocation units I wouldn't mind using that one and putting 95 on it unless someone has a solution for it, I am interested to see if we can get it to go. Or should I suck it up and buy another Verbatim CF Card ?