megatron-uk wrote on 2021-05-20, 11:22:

All have the same symptoms - content is inaccessible/appears corrupt beyond 8GB, regardless of the tool used to partition or format the drives.

Have you tried freedos instead of win98se dos ?

or maybe install an old linux and run f3 'fight flash fraud' on it. 😀

weedeewee wrote on 2021-05-20, 11:37:

megatron-uk wrote on 2021-05-20, 11:22:

All have the same symptoms - content is inaccessible/appears corrupt beyond 8GB, regardless of the tool used to partition or format the drives.

Have you tried freedos instead of win98se dos ?

or maybe install an old linux and run f3 'fight flash fraud' on it. 😀

If it were just the one card I perhaps would be starting to suspect a problem with the card itself - but it was a retail packaged Sandisk Ultra bought with several others of the same capacity from the Sandisk 'store' on Amazon. I also have a 64GB Sandisk Ultra that I bought elsewhere; same issue. I also get the same problems with several old 2.5" notebook drives (mainly 60GB and 80GB IBM Travelstars) I've had in my possession for years. None of the above appear to have any issues with copying/accessing way more than 8GB of content on my Linux system.

I've not tried Freedos, no. But the last time I looked, it was a bit of a pain to try and get installed with just a floppy drive.

megatron-uk wrote on 2021-05-20, 12:28:

If it were just the one card I perhaps would be starting to suspect a problem with the card itself - but it was a retail packaged Sandisk Ultra bought with several others of the same capacity from the Sandisk 'store' on Amazon. I also have a 64GB Sandisk Ultra that I bought elsewhere; same issue. I also get the same problems with several old 2.5" notebook drives (mainly 60GB and 80GB IBM Travelstars) I've had in my possession for years. None of the above appear to have any issues with copying/accessing way more than 8GB of content on my Linux system.

I've not tried Freedos, no. But the last time I looked, it was a bit of a pain to try and get installed with just a floppy drive.

I'm not suspecting a problem with the card, as you say you copied the files in the card reader, and all are present, then you move to xtide and accesses above 8GB seem to fail.
Which would indicate some translation issue seems to be present. Whether that is in the xt-ide bios, original bios, dos version, or an odd combination of them is an interesting and annoying mistery at this time.

Is it even possible to install linux on an xtide supported CF or hdd ?

I've got no real ideas, either.
- Maybe there's some LBA, FAT32 or partitioning problem between modern Windows and DOS 7.x, not sure. 🙁

What you can try is another option ROM of the kinds of XTIDE Universal BIOS.
In the 90s, many socalled EIDE Enhancer cards had them.
A special BIOS LBA EIDE Multi-IO Controller: DTC EIDE Ultima Pro

There's one DOS that's left to try, also.: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PTS-DOS
Later versions had FAT32 support, apparently.

In the XTIDE config program, what have you got the CHS translation method set to for the drive? Is it on Auto? If it is, try the Assisted LBA option and then save & reflash the ROM. Though according to the documentation, that is supposed to be the default option it uses in Auto mode.

@Jo22 - thanks; just flashed that EIDE BIOS, but it doesn't detect anything - I can see the splash screen flash up for maybe 300ms, but it shows:

primary master: none
primary slave: none
secondary master: none
secondary slave: none

... .so it's running, just doesn't detect anything.

@PTherapist - already tried that unfortunately. By default it's set to 'Auto', but on flashing the latest r606 release (when I thought that the CHS translation bug report was in some way related) I specifically set it to "Assisted LBA". Behaviour is identical to "Auto" from the r605 versions I had previously.

I've given Ontrack a try, but it doesn't show any visible partition information when I put the drive or CF card into my Linux machine, which makes it unusable from a point of easily getting content on/off the drive.

I've also tried EZDrive (9.06) a go - that looks more promising; initially I wanted to use a FAT16 OS partition and FAT32 data, but EZDrive also mucks up the partition table geometry somewhat so that the only accessible partition in Linux is the first one. So now I've resorted to a single 16GB FAT32 partition.

At present I'm filling up the first 7.5GB of the drive with several large, zero-filled files. Then I'll copy on another GB or so of directories with actual content in. Then test access again.

Well it looks like EZDrive is the winner - I have >9GB of content on the drive and it is all showing as accessible; no empty folders, corrupted filenames or similar. The entire partition can be mounted within Linux and I can still use my modern PC to drag and drop stuff to it.

I don't have an answer why the XTIDE BIOS combination didn't seem to work for content over and above the 8GB region; the documentation says it should, and all the tools used to set it up are FAT32/LBA aware, so I really can't explain it.

I wish I could help but this makes no sense. Sad you had to resort to using a gross DDO

maxtherabbit wrote on 2021-05-20, 15:26:

I wish I could help but this makes no sense. Sad you had to resort to using a gross DDO

Me too. There's no rational explanation for why it doesn't work.

maybe I missed it but what's the BIOS on your motherboard? I wonder if there is some incompatibility in the int13 hooks

It's a MR BIOS image - a generic one for Symphony SL82c461 chipset.

XTIDE Universal BIOS r611 should fix the problem. Drives supporting LBA48 commands (even if the drive is 128GB or smaller) were affected by the bug.

aitotat wrote on 2021-05-22, 20:44:

XTIDE Universal BIOS r611 should fix the problem. Drives supporting LBA48 commands (even if the drive is 128GB or smaller) were affected by the bug.

Thank you for the info! I will have to try that version or newer as well, as I was hitting an odd issue with LBA48 drives partioned on other controllers with LBA48 support not being accessible through XTIDE and vice versa . I was using R602 .
Re: Adding XT-IDE option ROM to Asus P3B-F BIOS .

aitotat wrote on 2021-05-22, 20:44:

XTIDE Universal BIOS r611 should fix the problem. Drives supporting LBA48 commands (even if the drive is 128GB or smaller) were affected by the bug.

Ah, excellent!

One problem though - I've exhausted all of my blank 27C128's for the moment 😁

Silly me never got round to buying an eraser, so I'll have to pick one up before I can give this a test. I'm surprised no-one else had come across the >8GB accessibility issue previously.

megatron-uk wrote on 2021-05-23, 08:57:

I'm surprised no-one else had come across the >8GB accessibility issue previously.

I wonder when the bug first appeared or if it maybe only affects certain systems.

I'm running an older version of XTIDE on a 486 - r598 and it has a 1GB CF Master & a 120GB HDD Slave all working fine. The 120GB HDD is partitioned as a single partition and works fine both in Windows 95 & its DOS.

I went to get the updated Xtide universal bios and it looks like their site is down.

Can’t get to either https://www.xtideuniversalbios.org/
or https://www.lo-tech.co.uk/

I too noticed the outage but it seems to be working now.