What kind of disk controller are you running these cards on?

Yeah and what motherboard and CF adapter ? Hanging on a format is not a good sign..

They're just generic IDE to CF adapters, save for the one Sandisk PCMCIA to CF adapter inserted into an Adtron PCMCIA to IDE adapter. The controllers I haven't a clue. I've tried multiple motherboards all with the same exact results. I should reiterate that this is only happening with the Innodisk cards. Other brands such as Transcend, Adaptec and Sandisk all work fine.

Do they pass h2testw?

Hi!

http://www.windowsgalore.com/windows.95/setup.switches.html

Does the /s switch make any difference?
It will prevent smart drive from being used.

Good luck!
Jo22

Did you use fdisk /mbr? It sets the master not record, which is more than often needed with cf

Good idea, but let's keep in mind that fdisk /mbr works differently between DOS 6.2x <-> DOS 7.x.

https://thestarman.pcministry.com/asm/mbr/FDISK.htm

I do often recommend S0KILL for wiping a CF card, too.
It will clear track 0, so the medium appears as new from factory.

Re: IDE to Compact Flash as MS-DOS boot drive.

Hi guys,

I finally got around to trying a couple of suggestions here and this is what I've found:

-Ran h2testw on all four Innodisk brand 4GB cards found nothing, and passed the read/write test with flying colors.
-Ran Spur0kill, no errors.
-Partitioned and formatted, no errors or bad sectors
-Dumped all Win95 and Win98 install files to each card, no errors
-Created two individual directories for Windows 95 and Windows 98Se install files, no errors
-Ran Windows 95 install, hangs at 100% at the setup prep screen, activity LED is solid red.
-Ran Windows 98 install, hangs at 18% at the setup prep screen, activity LED is solid red.

There is an error that pops up about 2-3 minutes after it hangs at the install screen: "ATTENTION: A serious disk error has occurred while writing to drive C:"

I've attached a couple of screenshots of what is happening.

Which mainboard are you using?

Can you select the transfer mode for the IDE device in the bios? PIO 123, MWDMA, UDMA ?
try with udma & block mode disabled.
also make sure boot sector virus protection in bios is turned off.
and run memtest or a pc stress test for a prolonged period of time if the transfer mode selection ends up giving the same results.

I've been testing an IDE emulator and doing some win9x, xp installs and trying out different motherboards, and most of my problems either stemmed from memory errors, mainboard errors or user errors 😉
It was a great way of finding out that out of the say 20 mainboards that I have laying around, only about 4 or 5 actually work consistently and allow the install of win 9x/xp to actually complete without errors and allow multiple consecutive installs without errors.

weedeewee wrote on 2022-02-13, 20:40:

Which mainboard are you using?

Pro860C, a variant of the IBM Aptiva D1N motherboard (but not an IBM brand computer). Also tried this in a Wyse Winterm XL2000, and a couple of other machines that I can't think of.

Can you select the transfer mode for the IDE device in the bios? PIO 123, MWDMA, UDMA ?
try with udma & block mode disabled.

Turned block mode off. Didn't change anything. There's no setting for UDMA, it's locked in at UDMA 2. Tried changing it to normal, large, and LBA modes, but still makes no difference other than it's now screwed one of the cards up. CHS detected it as 528mb, LBA now sees it at 1017mb. Forcing it into auto now sees it as "CHS" and not "LBA."

and run memtest or a pc stress test for a prolonged period of time if the transfer mode selection ends up giving the same results.

Trust me, it's not a memory issue. This problem is spanning across different motherboards and 5 different adapters and it's only isolated to these 4 particular Innodisk brand compact flash cards. All other brand cards and capacities work fine. There's got to be something internally wrong that is going undetected. Read/write tests aren't showing anything, neither does formatting, partitioning or dumping chunks of data onto them. It's only during the initial install process that they lock up.

Hm. Interesting. Maybe the cards have issues with certain ATA commands or something else gets triggered during early install.

The pop-up in the upper left corner reminds me of the old boot-sector protection schemes embedded in certain vintage BIOSes, by the way.

The fact that it is able to overlay a VGA graphics mode (mode 12h) is interesting, too.

Hm. I do have an idea you can try, if you're adventurous.

a) Try installing Windows 3.1 first and run an upgrade from Windows 3.1

b) Same as above, but with the MicroHouse FastDisk driver being installed and active (32-Bit Disk Access).
http://win31.de/edrivers.htm
It can handle HDDs up to 8GB.

c) Same as above, but with WfW 3.11 and the cache also enabled (32-Bit File Access).

Good luck! 😉