This is very interesting. The BIOS detects my 80GB Western Digital IDE drive just fine.

Out of curiosity, I tried one of my Crucial 128GB SSDs with a SATA-IDE adapter, and the entire disk capacity was detected.

It seems like the issue is only with the CF card. I know that this disk isn't counterfeit and that the full capacity works just fine as a removable disk.

I know that this card has the "removable" bit set, so maybe this is triggering a different disk detection subroutine that does not have large disk support.

I also confirmed that my 3Ghz P4 533Mhz bus (SL6PG) is a Northwood core works just fine. The other processor I mentioned is a Prescott core, so it's not the bus speed that is the limiting factor, specifically.

This further supports the theory that the board labeled as "rev 1.3" is the newer board.

Problem solved 😀.

I have picked up one of these boards, because it had 3 ISA slots and PS/2 mouse and keyboard connectivity and some 'modern' features. However, I did not see this thread though initially. My board is a Rev B1, so far I have been very lucky it would seem, I did find a manual for it though before getting it, so was aware of the AGP socket and CF card slot being linked to the IDE 2 Master channel. I am running it mostly as a crazy MS-DOS/Windows 98SE monster. SB16 works like a charm without issues, but I am only using it with 16gb SSD's.

However, not deal breakers but did have a few issues/quirks:

1) The only thing I could not get working is my Gus PNP, which in an old setup I had working alongside my SB16 and HardMPU (i.e. everything disabled and epprom re-programmed, etc.), but with this board whatever I try it would not work, digging into the ports, port 260 (which I usually use for the Gus) seems to be used by something on the motherboard which I cannot change, so changed it on the Gus, but it would still not work, in fact every time I try to run a game with Gus music it will either crash, or I cannot hear the music at all, so all I can assess is there is a conflict somewhere

2) Regarding graphics cards, my 6200 PCI card works fine in Windows 98 and the on board graphics does not take over. However, like previously mentioned, despite being disabled in the BIOS it still shows up as a standard PCI graphics card in device manager (I did not install the Intel drivers as I had the 6200), along side the Nvidia device.

3) I run my computers through a KVM so can use the same keyboard, mouse and monitors and keep my desk/setup tidy(ish), the keyboard works fine but in Windows 98 one touch of the mouse and the pointer goes crazy and then the machine freezes. plug the same mouse directly into the PS/2 port on the machine instead of going through the KVM and it works find, which is odd never had that before. However, I can connect the KVM via USB instead of PS/2 and that works, so doing it that way at the moment, but DOS is not a fan of the USB mouse driver.

Overall though having a P4 3.06GHz running Windows 98 is rather cool, next is to upgrade it from 512mb to 2gb so time to find those software patches!