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NRC 3227 486 machines trouble with cf card I bios

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First post, by Jens Ledet

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Hi there this is my first post, after I have read along without being a member 😀
I have two NRC 3227 486 computers, I want to put a cf card in them as hdd instead of the rotating ones they have now.
i mannaged to install dos 6.22 and win 3.11 on a 2 gb card, it all went good and booted for a hole day, then sudedently the next day I won't boot no more... I could use a dos bootdiskette and then boot the win 3.11 from the cf card from there.. so the disk worked, but could not boot no more..
then i wanted to reinstall the whole thing again, and now the troubles started..
The bios and fdisk and pqmagic is now only seeing 504 mb, and not 2gb like before (I have not changed anything in bios it detects auto) I tried to put the card in my card reader in my win 10 pc, and here it is now only 504mb also
i have used clearhdd, and then fdisk, but no luck.. -after clearhdd the win 10 machine sees all 2gb but not the 486 machines
if I want to manually enter the disk size in bios it prompts me to use a program called userhdd.
userhdd have I found in a link in another post in this forum, but it is for the 33xx series, my is 32xx.. off cause I have tried it anyway, but the computer prompts that it is not working on this pc. Here is the link https://web.archive.org/web/19990202084704/ht … /Machines.shtml
Does anyone know what to do, or where to find userhdd for the 3227/3230 machines ?
Kind regard Jens

Reply 1 of 1, by ux-3

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ok,
your bios only allows for 504 mb it seems (common boundary for 486). If you just create larger disks by other means, they will act OK but corrupt eventually.
To corrobarate this, run scandisk media check on one of those oversized disks. After a while (after 503.xx MB), you might see errors.
This problem will also likely occur, if you use modern cloning software.

Just use Fdisk on the machine itself. It will create a 503.xx MB partition. That should work stable.

If you are determined to use 2 GB, you will have to either use a different bios (i.e. on a NIC), or use some boot software. There are plenty of threads here in this forum for that, as this topic comes up at least weekly.

Myself, I use a few 1GB cards that I format to 503.xx. That way, they work trouble free.

Retro PC warning: The things you own end up owning you.

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