All I can contribute is that these were sold with a 120GB HDD, so it's not #2 (BIOS limit).
But since there is an issue, I'd avoid hacked windows versions and free 3rd party fdisk and check if Win ME or even XP can see the whole card, just to rule out that factor.

konc wrote on 2023-01-09, 17:06:

All I can contribute is that these were sold with a 120GB HDD, so it's not #2 (BIOS limit).
But since there is an issue, I'd avoid hacked windows versions and free 3rd party fdisk and check if Win ME or even XP can see the whole card, just to rule out that factor.

Ok sweet, thanks! I'll create a bootable ME disk just to use it's fdisk and let you know. if not, xp sp1 or sp2, etc.

Stock Fdisk should not be an issue for drives smaller than 64GB .
https://www.betaarchive.com/wiki/index.php/Mi … _Archive/263044

Make sure you are setting the drive to LBA in BIOS .

Do you have another drive or CF card to test with ?

darry wrote on 2023-01-09, 17:42:

Stock Fdisk should not be an issue for drives smaller than 64GB . https://www.betaarchive.com/wiki/index.php/Mi … _Archive/26304 […]
Show full quote

Stock Fdisk should not be an issue for drives smaller than 64GB .
https://www.betaarchive.com/wiki/index.php/Mi … _Archive/263044

Make sure you are setting the drive to LBA in BIOS .

Do you have another drive or CF card to test with ?

It is set to LBA in the bios. No, I don't. It is recognized as 32GB on my modern m1 mac though as well, just with the 8gb partition that was created by 98.

Going to test the ME fdisk in a bit, also remember that while win95d lite 1.5/1.6 is incredible imo, it's successor is a very alpha project and i cannot possibly verify if the fdisk is even stock. What throws me off the most is that Super FDisk isn't reading it, and that's the most recommended third party one I can think of.

Looks like ME doesn't work.

I was also reading the manual for the startech bay adapter and the SS51G itself. I don't see any particular jumpers or headers.

I also tried super fdisk again and intentionally cleared the mbr in case it was a partitioning/formatting issue. Still read as 8GB. No big deal by the way, I made an image backup with macos disk utility before doing so.

Gonna try 2000 now.

Haven't experienced similar issues with my shuttles, sk43g being the older and closer of the two in age to yours. I didn't try to use a CF card though since I've had too much annoyance with them.
It could be a funky CF identification issue. If you run WhatIDE from a DOS boot disk it should tell you what it's reporting.

Windows 2000 works. What the heck, it really is a "if it starts with dos it doesn't like it" kind of deal.

So could i theoretically just:
1. write my 8GB image back
2. use win2k to create a fat32 partition and proceed not to install, then use a drive letter manager to move it to after D: for extra storage?
Or is there some way to format the entire disk in a 98 friendly way without fdisk?

Any ideas on ways around this, like drive overlays? Or do you think the bios/cf adapter quirk would prefer a different brand of CF?

[EDIT] random thought, while they shipped with 120GB drives I imagine it isn't a real bios limitation so much as a bios quirk when interacting with dos + the cf adapter, which happens very often in regard to storage if many threads on here and my own anecdotal experience aren't any indication. Tried to look for a fan mod beyond the 2003 update that's already installed, found none.

I crossed out my questions, because fundamentally dos+my current bios = a hard read of the disk at exactly 8GB, so any of my proposed ideas won't work.

Fixed! Answer Clue was in the wiki, just not in a very obvious section. I changed LBA to CHS and it [edit: somewhat] works now.

[EDIT]
Nevermind the above. With win98 fdisk or super fdisk it gets as far as formatting and partitioning, but now win98 doesn't recognize it.

[EDIT2] It looks like it never actually saves the format. WinME proved this when it formatted and immediately tried to install after.

To update everyone I gave up and just accepted the 8GB limit. But more or less, yeah it has to do with the CF controller I picked and it's interaction with that bios.

With minimal/medium installs and a stack of cds it isn't that bad. And if you really wanted to be modern, it has zero problem having my 256GB usb plugged in as well (thanks to patches), so you could daemon tools anything that didn't require D: drive.

This is why I don't bother with CF cards. I've tried several adapters, from cheap to expensive, CF, SD, you name it. All I've found is loads of compatibility or performance issues on about 50% of the machines I've tested them on. So, as long as I can still find working spinning hard-disks I'll be using those, and I advise any retro enthusiast to do the same.

Similar story with SATA to IDE adapters and SSDs. At one point I got a great deal on a couple dozen 64 and 120GB SATA SSDs to use with my retro PCs, but due to various compatibility issues I ended up only using them on machines with native SATA and newer (socket 370 and above) retro PCs with PCI SATA controllers.

Socket3 wrote on 2023-01-19, 22:14:

This is why I don't bother with CF cards. I've tried several adapters, from cheap to expensive, CF, SD, you name it. All I've found is loads of compatibility or performance issues on about 50% of the machines I've tested them on. So, as long as I can still find working spinning hard-disks I'll be using those, and I advise any retro enthusiast to do the same.

Similar story with SATA to IDE adapters and SSDs. At one point I got a great deal on a couple dozen 64 and 120GB SATA SSDs to use with my retro PCs, but due to various compatibility issues I ended up only using them on machines with native SATA and newer (socket 370 and above) retro PCs with PCI SATA controllers.

I agree on the SATA point, I haven't had the greatest luck with those.

However, I somewhat am ok with the compromises on CF. This is my second CF machine and i never ran into performance or compatibility issues other than an 8GB limit. You also can't dual boot them sometimes, because apparently some OS boot disks recognize them as removable storage and will refuse to install unless it can use the whole drive (I tried to use up the remaining 24GB for windows 2000 and that's pretty much what it claimed).

rishooty wrote on 2023-01-19, 22:25:

Socket3 wrote on 2023-01-19, 22:14:

This is why I don't bother with CF cards. I've tried several adapters, from cheap to expensive, CF, SD, you name it. All I've found is loads of compatibility or performance issues on about 50% of the machines I've tested them on. So, as long as I can still find working spinning hard-disks I'll be using those, and I advise any retro enthusiast to do the same.

Similar story with SATA to IDE adapters and SSDs. At one point I got a great deal on a couple dozen 64 and 120GB SATA SSDs to use with my retro PCs, but due to various compatibility issues I ended up only using them on machines with native SATA and newer (socket 370 and above) retro PCs with PCI SATA controllers.

I agree on the SATA point, I haven't had the greatest luck with those.

However, I somewhat am ok with the compromises on CF. This is my second CF machine and i never ran into performance or compatibility issues other than an 8GB limit.

I've tried them on well over 20 machines and half of the time there's issues that range from the device not being detected at all, not booting, wrong capacity and file system corruption to 1-3 second freezing during loading and file operations under win9x.

To each his own I guess, but I'm staying away from these things.