If it sees it as 270MB drive in the BIOS then the Cylinder/Head/Sector settings are set incorrectly in order for this machine to use the CF card. You need to fiddle around with the C/H/S settings so it will initialize and use the full 2GB (if that BIOS supports it, which given that it runs a P75, era-wise, it should.)

You could try the following settings if the HDD autodetect (if the BIOS has it) doesnt work

3949 16 63 resulting in 2,038,063,104 bytes.

If you don't have any luck in fiddling around with the C/H/S settings, then you may have use overlay software like EZ-Drive (it will translate the CHS data for your BIOS when booted from HDD/card)

jaZz_KCS wrote:

If it sees it as 270MB drive in the BIOS then the Cylinder/Head/Sector settings are set incorrectly in order for this machine to […]
Show full quote

If it sees it as 270MB drive in the BIOS then the Cylinder/Head/Sector settings are set incorrectly in order for this machine to use the CF card. You need to fiddle around with the C/H/S settings so it will initialize and use the full 2GB (if that BIOS supports it, which given that it runs a P75, era-wise, it should.)

You could try the following settings if the HDD autodetect (if the BIOS has it) doesnt work

3949 16 63 resulting in 2,038,063,104 bytes.

If you don't have any luck in fiddling around with the C/H/S settings, then you may have use overlay software like EZ-Drive (it will translate the CHS data for your BIOS when booted from HDD/card)

Well it was easier than that to get 2GB to show up - this HP BIOS is so weird. I had to go into setup, go to the hard drive and it was set to 270MB Custom. I only had to press F8 (next value) and it jumped to 2GB right away.

FDISK will now make a 2GB partition but the reading and writing errors remain. I just formatted it and at the end of the format, got a drive reading error.

I'm starting to think the adapters are to blame. My IBM PCs use different adapters but these had no master/slave pins and the HP Vectra only has a single IDE cable and those adapters really didn't like having a CD drive on the same cable so I had to get an adapter that did have a master/slave option but the controller on it may be too slow to read the data. Retrying always works but during installations and saving games this would be a serious issue. I think I may have to go with the option of a small SSD instead. I'll see if I can hook up my 480GB SSD using a SATA-to-PATA - it worked for my IBM PC 330 so who knows. If it works, I'll order a small 64GB one - no sense wasting a large drive just to use 2GB of it.

EDIT: I forgot I also had a IDE-to-SD adapter and a 2GB SD card to go with it. This one didn't work in my IBM PCs for some reason but it seems to work fine in this one. It detected the card fine and installed DOS without any error. I think this confirms the issue is with the CF adapters. The SD card feels a lot snappier too - so maybe in the end it was a good thing the CF didn't work out.

jaZz_KCS wrote:

You could try the following settings if the HDD autodetect (if the BIOS has it) doesnt work

3949 16 63 resulting in 2,038,063,104 bytes.

If you don't have any luck in fiddling around with the C/H/S settings, then you may have use overlay software like EZ-Drive (it will translate the CHS data for your BIOS when booted from HDD/card)

That isn't a good value for cylinders (under DOS 6.22), you want to stay with the limits of 1024/255/63. Increase the number of heads instead.
If DOS gives you "sector not found" errors it's a strong sign that the CHS values are out of range (for either DOS or the BIOS).

jmarsh wrote:

jaZz_KCS wrote:

You could try the following settings if the HDD autodetect (if the BIOS has it) doesnt work

3949 16 63 resulting in 2,038,063,104 bytes.

If you don't have any luck in fiddling around with the C/H/S settings, then you may have use overlay software like EZ-Drive (it will translate the CHS data for your BIOS when booted from HDD/card)

That isn't a good value for cylinders (under DOS 6.22), you want to stay with the limits of 1024/255/63. Increase the number of heads instead.
If DOS gives you "sector not found" errors it's a strong sign that the CHS values are out of range (for either DOS or the BIOS).

Well right now, the values are 3872 - 16 - 63 and I no longer get any errors. Everything installed fine using these (detected by the BIOS).

Have you done a surface scan with chkdsk/scandisk to make sure the entire disk is accessible?

jmarsh wrote:

Have you done a surface scan with chkdsk/scandisk to make sure the entire disk is accessible?

Good idea - I'm doing a scandisk right now. It's about halfway without any errors now and I don't really expect any.

how does a surface scan help with that?

mrau wrote:

how does a surface scan help with that?

It uses BIOS int13 to read every sector in the partition. If DOS has an issue with accessing cylinders beyond 1023 it will throw an error when it reaches that part of the disk.

jmarsh wrote:

mrau wrote:

how does a surface scan help with that?

It uses BIOS int13 to read every sector in the partition. If DOS has an issue with accessing cylinders beyond 1023 it will throw an error when it reaches that part of the disk.

Well oddly enough, it did throw an error for the last 1% of sectors - none had any data so it just disabled those. A second scan showed no problems. I lost about 120MB out of a 2GB SD card so it's not that bad.