douglar wrote on 2023-03-13, 02:23:

For the CDRom drive, did you set the master and slave jumpers?

What motherboard, bios, and controller are you using?

Yes I did, obviously cd is slave, while the cf\sd whatever is master, furthermore they are on different channels.
It's a ECS (aka pc chips) P4S5A-DX+, latest bios.
That being said I may have found the issue. Here is what I do, use gparted to partition the sdcard\cf as follow:
1) NTFS partition of 5 gb (WINXP)
2) FAT32 partition of 2gb (WIN98)
3) FAT32 partition of the remaining space (DATA) where I want to install programs and use it as archive of programs I may need.
Windows xp works fine, see all partitions. Dos 7.10\win98 doesn't, all of those are primary partitions (according to the manual you can have 4 of them).
I've read an older topic where some users were having the very same issue and solved it creating 1 primary partition FAT32 where it will be installed WIN98, then and extended partition containing the data and ntfs winxp partition.
I did so and didn't have the chance to test further but in such configuration dos 7.10 was able to see both fat32 partition (didn't test if they worked though), but on my caily computer this configuration didn't allow me to see the partitions, just one was visibile on windows 10.

I will do some further tests.

Edit: create an extended partition which contains the fat32 data partition plus the ntfs (winxp) partition solved the issue, but now windows xp is slow like hell and it hangs. I don't know if it is a problem of the cf card but since with the sd card worked fine and the cf card should be faster, I don't know.

I went back to the sd card and I created a first NTFS partition for windows xp, then a fat 32 primary partition for dos and an extended partition for data (fat32). Another hole in the water, apparently windows98 didn't like this arrangement, nor windows xp, both unable to boot.
So now I created a 2gb partition for windows 98 (fat32), another 4gb primary partition for windows XP (ntfs) and an extended and logical blabla partition for DATA for the rest of the space (around 24gb).
Dos bootdisk is able to see both partitions (not ntfs obviously), but when I proceed to format the extended partition even the first one stops to work.
That being said, i'm going back to an hard drive.