Kahenraz wrote on 2025-10-20, 01:27:

I had a 2GB CF card formatted as FAT that worked just fine in Windows 98 but couldn't read in DOS, even though it was visible as an ATA drive and assigned a drive letter according to cardinfo.exe. I tried atainit.exe which wiped the partition table. I could the access the disk but the files were corrupted. It was unable to be formatted for some reason with format.com or format.exe. I popped the disk into Windows 10, formatted as FAT, popped it back into the laptop and the drive was inaccessible again. Instead, I ran atainit and then formatted it immediately afterwards on the laptop. Then it was accessible on both Windows and DOS without any problems.

I just wanted to share this really difficult experience trying to get my CF card working between both modern Windows and my laptop's PCMCIA card reader on DOS. I hope that this helps someone.

When you say "couldn't read in DOS", what do you mean? Are you booting from a floppy or are you pressing F8 during boot and selecting "Command Prompt". Win98 boots DOS before it starts so it has to be readable in DOS somehow. My guess is you have drive overlay software installed on the computer.

Get the enabler from tssc.de, it will make the process easier.

The drive letter for the CF card couldn't be read when I tried to "CD" to it in DOS, despite a letter being assigned and seeing it visible with cardinfo.exe. I think that there was something about the partition table that CardWizard didn't like. The CF card could be read just fine from Windows 98.

Kahenraz wrote on 2025-10-21, 18:36:

The drive letter for the CF card couldn't be read when I tried to "CD" to it in DOS, despite a letter being assigned and seeing it visible with cardinfo.exe. I think that there was something about the partition table that CardWizard didn't like. The CF card could be read just fine from Windows 98.

Did you boot DOS from a diskette or did you press F8 during the win98 boot and select "Command Prompt" ?

I booted straight into DOS 7.1. Windows 98 runs on a separate partition. I use the GRUB4DOS boot manager.

That sounds odd. Isn't DOS 7.1 part of Windows 98?

But regardless of that question, I think you have to load the dos drivers to read from the CF card if you're plugging it into a pcmcia device.

That's the CardWizard software. It is loaded and a drive letter is assigned.

Kahenraz wrote on 2025-10-22, 03:23:

That's the CardWizard software. It is loaded and a drive letter is assigned.

What is the date on the CardWizard driver for DOS ? If it is older than June 1994, perhaps the CardWizard driver for DOS has the 512MB CHS limit while the CardWizard driver for Windows does not.

Or, 'it only knows fa16'.

I think that there is some kind of miscommunication. I got it working through the procedure mentioned in the original post. It's a 2GB CF card that was formatted FAT16.

Maybe the CF card is not fully ATA compliant?

2gb cards are usually older, and OK, though...

It was a problem with the partition table.