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Sector not found, DOS FAT16 corruption

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First post, by nio

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Hi, i've tried to revive my Toshiba T2110 486 75MHz with 4MB memory.

First, I've setup an virtual machine in VirtualBox wih virtual HDD of size 1.95GB.
I've installed DOS 6.22 using virtual floppies and installer. It had formatted the drive.
Next i've installed aoatapi.sys driver:

https://forums.virtualbox.org/viewtopic.php?t=845

I've created an ISO image using Free ISO Create Wizard. It had filesystem type of ISO9660 Level 1.
It had 568MB in size. It contained various games to test out new memory 4MB module extension I didn't install yet.

Next I've turned off the virtual machine with DOS and i've connected CF card reader with
16GB Sandisk Ultra 50MB/s compact flash card to my PC. Next I booted my Ubuntu 15.10.
There was an USB filter that catches the CF card reader for ubuntu virtual machine.
I have the same DOS virtual HDD from DOS VM connected to ubuntu VM, so i could easily dd
the data from DOS virtual HDD to CF card byte by byte. I did copy around 2GB of data to 16GB
card so the rest of the space was left as it was.

After turning ubuntu machine off, windows detected CF card again and probably corrupted the
FAT16 filesystem on CF card because it had created some System volume information directory
and files with long names there.

I've successfully booted the T2110 with DOS 6.22. Half of the files were corrupted and other half not.
Dyna blaster did run despite the low amount of memory and levels 1,2 were running ok.
Other games and software were outputing an error:

sector not found

What could have possibly gone wrong? How do you transfer files to DOS properly? How do you prevent modern OS interfering with your CF card? My floppy drive is dead and I don't have any other equipment for my toshiba laptop.

Reply 1 of 4, by Ampera

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Search up "How to disable System Volume Information"

Myself personally, I have never had an issue with this. It always writes it to my floppy diskettes, and they read fine. DOS 6.22 should be able to handle long file names by shortening them.

Reply 2 of 4, by Jorpho

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nio wrote:
I have the same DOS virtual HDD from DOS VM connected to ubuntu VM, so i could easily dd the data from DOS virtual HDD to CF car […]
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I have the same DOS virtual HDD from DOS VM connected to ubuntu VM, so i could easily dd
the data from DOS virtual HDD to CF card byte by byte. I did copy around 2GB of data to 16GB
card so the rest of the space was left as it was.

After turning ubuntu machine off, windows detected CF card again and probably corrupted the
FAT16 filesystem on CF card because it had created some System volume information directory
and files with long names there.

I'm not entirely clear on just what you're doing, but why not just eject the CF card before turning the Ubuntu machine off?

Reply 4 of 4, by nio

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I've changed HDD mode from Standard HDD to EIDE and i didn't see any sector not found errors for a while. It can be something about the particular model of CF card. Unfortunately i'm not sure why but Warcraft II demo installer freezes at 11% of copied files. So my system is still unreliable. Installer had detected low amount of memory. I'm not sure if the installer needs more memory or if it's only about running the installed game.
After some amount of soft and hard reboots and power cycling the machine, the system could not find the CF card anymore. I've probably found the source of the problems. The PATA 2.5" to CF card adapter has too large height under it's pcb, so it doesn't fit well into PATA connector and the contact is not good. I've moved the adapter a bit and the CF card showed up as HDD again. Maybe there's no much difference between selecting Standard HDD and EIDE mode in BIOS.
I'll try to use normal PATA HDD when i'll get my hands on some.

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