First post, by Swiego
I am trying to restore a Compaq Deskpro XL 590.
So far with conventional hardware I have been successful getting it up and running using windows 98 SE. By conventional hardware, I mean an IDE hard drive and an IDE optical drive. I have been able to drop a working operating system on three different hard drives at this point. Note that so far I have not been able to create a partition greater than 4 GB, which may be a limitation of this computer; while I would like to expose more storage, this is not the urgent topic that I am trying to solve.
The problem I’m running into is when I swap out a period correct hard drive and replace it with a compact flash card connected to a Syba IDE adapter that I purchased off Amazon recently. The moment I swapped to this card, I run into problems. The Compaq system configuration utility floppy diskette set is able to recognize the drive and will go so far as to let me drop the custom partition with the configuration utility on it. I can boot to this utility on the CF card as well. Regardless, each time at boot, I get a BIOS warning: 1740-fixed disk 0 failed set Block Mode command.
Running through the configuration utility does not clear this error.
While the configuration utility will drop the partition, the windows 98 boot disk does not see the CF drive. So, I cannot install an OS.
I have bought two different Syba adapters and tried three different SanDisk extreme pro CF cards. I realize these cards do not have the fixed disk flag set so I have a 1GB transcend industrial card on the way that I hope will help. Other than this I am running out of options. Any suggestions?