fact 1: dos <=3.3 will only handle 32 mb partitions
fact 2: you should be able using it to define more than one of those (up to 8 if i remember correctly?)

An advice that only comes out of personal experience with CF's & XT-CF on such machines: try to partition the cf from scratch ON the machine you are going to use it, using the fdisk program of the dos you are going to use.

Thanks Konc for your reply and extra info.

Fact 1: Thanks for confirming that 3.2 will only handly 32mb.
Fact 2: My Tandy Dos 3.2 comes with a 2nd disk where Fdisk is. It seem to be Fdisk V1.0 by Tandy 1985. It doesn't seem to allow anything else than 1 partition and that's why I tried to setup the card on the Pentium. There it seem to work obviously (Dos 7.1), but back on the Tandy it could only see the 1st partition of 32mb, therefore not helping me either.
It also seem like I have to originally format the card on the Pentium (dos 7.1) as on when bought they were formatted on windows 7 or else and when on the Tandy the are seen as non-dos partition without space left and can't be deleted (in fdisk anyway). So I formatted them on the pentium in FAT16 and then it seems like I can use them on the Tandy. Hope that explain my thinking/problems a bit more.

Not sure how I could get the 8x32mb partition, but if I could, I would be happy with that.
If someone could help me with that or the give me feedback on the Compaq 3.31 option, that would be great.

As an initial approach and before trying weird dos versions I would go for a vanilla, official 3.3. I'm not at all familiar with what restricitions 3.2 might have, moreover the tandy version. What I can confirm (having done it recently on an XT with XT-CF, otherwise I wouldn't be so confident about it) is that official 3.3 offers the possibility to define a number of 32MB drives on the extended partition. Good luck, those are the nicest games to play. Don't let frustration drive you other paths just to find a solution, that's half of the fun 😀 I wish I owned a tandy too btw.

Tandy DOS 3.2 comes with a group of special utilities which will allow you to have one bootable 32MB DOS partition and several non-bootable DOS partitions. They are MLPART, MLFORMAT and a device driver called MLPART.SYS would need to be loaded. Or you could use a generic DOS 4.0 or above.

Thanks Konc. I definitely won't let the frustration get the better of me. I am trying to set my gameroom with many old computers and console, all with added mods or multi-cart/floppy emulators and such... It's not an easy road, but the enjoyment of reliving the treasured memories these system have for me is priceless... And the joy of getting a system done and ready to enjoy is part of the fun too! Thanks for your help.

Thanks Great Hierophant for sharing your knowledge with me. When I saw the signature in your post, I was reminded of your blog which I had visited quite a while ago and immediately revisited. Thanks for the specific on MLPART and MLFORMAT, I have them on my disk and didn't know anything about it before you mentioned it. So definitely an option... However, I would prefer a all-in one card and if possible a bigger one than 256mb. From what I understand of your long post about Tandy 1000's, you were using Dos 5.0 on a 2GB card, is this right? How is that working? You mention that you added a few Tandy dos element to your install and config files, would you be able to share these tweak with me? Any disadvantage about this? You mention an amount of free memory which might be a bit lower, as this caused any problems with many games not loading for example. Please enlighten me more. Thanks again.

My hard disk controller supports hard drives no larger than 504MB, so having a hard drive much larger than that just wastes space.

If you use a more advanced version of DOS, like MS-DOS 5.0-6.22, you will have less conventional memory available because the OS takes up less RAM. This is on top of the RAM taken for video memory, which is 16KB for DOS. However, any game likely to run playably on an SX is not going to refuse to run because of memory. You should have something close to 570KB free.

The only crucial file you should take from your Tandy DOS 3.2 disk is the MODE program. This program can set the processor speed and the number of vertical lines displayed in text mode (200 vs 225) on a Tandy.

Thanks again. With the help of a friend, memory has now been upgraded from 384k to 640k and DOS 5.0 is now installed and running on my 256MB card. Now the fun of finding which games work begin...!