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Yet another CF-IDE boot problem

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First post, by cosmicinsane

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I have a Packard Bell Legend 2276 (Model PB420TA), 486DX2/66, Phoenix BIOS v1.01.E, and I’m having issues trying to get it to boot from a CF card.

I got the computer from eBay, it had a bad Varta battery and power supply (only 10V on the 12V rail). I replaced the battery with a 3xAA battery pack, and got a new AT power supply from Amazon.
The original hard drive worked long enough to back it up, but died soon after.

I purchased a CF-IDE adapter and a couple different cards to go with it. I have a Transcend Industrial 512MB, a Liliwell industrial 256MB, and an ancient Lexar 16MB. My BIOS does not auto detect drive geometry so I used idediag.exe to find the appropriate CHS values for each card.

Now I’ve tried about a million variations with each card, but the general failure remains the same. The drive is recognized, I can install MS-DOS, but attempting to boot to hard drive after DOS is installed either results in “Missing Operating System” error, or else it says “Starting MS-DOS” and then errors out saying bad or missing files for each line in config.sys. Navigating to the C: drive after booting from a floppy shows all files on the drive just fine, however nothing will run. If I copy a file from the C: drive to the floppy (edit.com and qbasic.exe for example) the programs can run fine, so I know the data is intact.

Some things I have tried:
-fdisk /mbr

-installing MS-DOS 6.0 and 6.22, both from floppy disks and from disk images on a floppy emulator

-Using DBAN on a different machine to zero fill each card

-Flipping the removable/fixed bit (I don’t think MS-DOS or windows 3.1 cares about this, and only the Liliwell card reports as removable) but neither Lexar Bootit or ATCFWCHG.COM utilities are able to actually change this on the Liliwell card

-Tried swapping IDE cables and master/slave jumper settings

The strange part is the Lexar 16MB CF card actually works. MS-DOS installs and boots, although with several errors on install, likely due to the age of the card and it’s extremely limited speed.

I did order a used 420MB hard drive, but I don’t want to be dependent on ancient hard disks to keep this thing running.

Anyone have any ideas of things I could try to make this thing boot from a CF card?

Reply 1 of 2, by Warlord

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try some windows utility called bootice. might for the sake of science try some drive overlay software as well.

Reply 2 of 2, by cosmicinsane

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Finally solved this one.

It appears this particular motherboard or BIOS simply will not boot from a CF card.

It appears this motherboard or BIOS is extremely picky about what cards it will boot from.

EZ-Drive DDO produces same failures on 5 different CF cards. However, since it’s Friday night and I’m on call so beer is not an option, I kept banging my head against it. Lo and behold the final 6th CF card I had actually began working after installing the EZ-DRIVE DDO. Was now able to again successfully install MS-DOS 6.22 but this time it will actually boot up and run.

So if you’re looking to use such a setup with this Packard Bell model, consider your alternatives. I would have saved money just buying a few hard drives rather than 6 different CF cards hoping to find a winner. I suppose, on the bright side, I might as well try a bigger CF card than 256mb.

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