In theory you should be able to write down the type/CHS/LBA of the working & formatted logical (not extended!) partition and turn that into a primary one (replacing the extended one) by entering the same with a disk editor, or a strict partition editor like PtEdit or (vintage) Linux fdisk/sfdisk…

There's also a mechanical solution/hack..

http://www.stefanv.com/electronics/ide_dual_boot.html

Ryccardo wrote on 2024-03-09, 08:44:

In theory you should be able to write down the type/CHS/LBA of the working & formatted logical (not extended!) partition and turn that into a primary one (replacing the extended one) by entering the same with a disk editor, or a strict partition editor like PtEdit or (vintage) Linux fdisk/sfdisk…

thanks ill try ptedit later and see how that works out. As for doing what you said with a disk editor i have no idea how to go about that, could you link a guide or something? And my vintage linux knowledge is non existant. Sorry for asking but i feel like a caveman at a keyboard atm

Jo22 wrote on 2024-03-09, 13:25:

There's also a mechanical solution/hack..

http://www.stefanv.com/electronics/ide_dual_boot.html

Thats an interesting idea actually, unfortunately this machine only has one IDE header so id have to pick between functioning cdrom or two disk drives. As for getting a controller card i was avoiding it for the same reason as XTIDE, cost and only having 3 ISA slots available. I do have a network card with what i think is an empty rom socket which can? Substitute xtide, but i have no idea how to set that up having never worked with roms before nor having a programmer.

AthlonBrick wrote on 2024-03-09, 17:12:

I do have a network card with what i think is an empty rom socket which can? Substitute xtide, but i have no idea how to set that up having never worked with roms before nor having a programmer.

Hi, XTIDE Universal BIOS (XUB) can boot from both primary master and secondary master (sound card).
So you can use either IDE channel.

My XUB backups that I've provided here are tested and configured for auto-detect.
They can be programmed into a suitable ROM chip and can be used without further doing.

Please just keep in mind that they're old by now. I've attached them to help people at troubleshooting their XTIDE installation, essentially.

All that's necessary to use XUB is to make sure the boot socket of the network card is being enabled (for most cards there are utilities for DOS).
The default address should be fine, too, normally.

Here are some videos I've made of using XTIDE.

Unfortunately Windows 95 doesn't seem to like the ordinary XUB version (XT or AT). 🙁
There's an AT/386 version available online that seems to be more compatible with 32-Bit OSes in general.

Anyway, the boot socket idea is still useful.
There used to be "E-IDE Enhancer" cards which usually contained an IDE BIOS and a fix for year 2000.

They're a bit like XTIDE Universal BIOS, except that they were meant for aged 386/486 PCs of the time, rather than XTs.
So they're literally meant to be used with DOS, OS/2 Warp and Windows 95/98.

They expect the popular AMI BIOS and Award BIOS, I believe.
So if you have either of them, they should work.

Picture of such a card and some information can be found here.

Good to know that XUB works with any IDE channel but this sb16(ct1740) only has an MKE interface. Would i be able to flash your XUB backups or an i386 version on the network card itself or would i need a rom flasher or proper xtide card instead? Also what kind of issues does the XT/AT versions of XUB have with windows 9x exactly? And I'll look at the videos you linked soon as i have some free time.

I've never heard of IDE enhancer cards before, neat that there were solutions 25 years ago, but in my case the bios is a rather limited compaq one. Though it could be worse given later machines dont have onboard setup and rely on a hidden partition or boot disk.

Ok i did eventually figure this out after a break and fresh eyes. Part of my problem, besides not knowing what im doing, was that this drive has bad sectors on one cylinder and dos/9x locks up when encountering them during formatting which lead me down the wrong path. I couldnt find a copy of ptedit.exe for dos either, just a bunch of dead links to a nortan/symantec ftp server and the occasional copy of ptedit32.

Anyways, i was able to get things working by following Ryccardo's suggestion with an extra step. Ranish isnt able to create entries in the MBR w/ a DDO but it can modify them. So create and format a extended/logical partition with fdisk then using ranish remove the logical partition(s), change the extended parition to a fat16/32 one, and then modify the starting head value and ending CHS values to match that of the first logical partition. Or you could just create the paritions in xfdisk and then reformat them using ranish to fix the corrupted partition information, but i didnt test the latter much beyond installing some games to it.

On a side note does anyone know how to cleanly shutdown/reboot win95 from a bat script? the popup prompting you to close the msdos window to shutdown actually stops the script instead of letting it exit on its own, and if its not quickly dismissed seems to lock it up requiring it to be killed where then win95 will then start shutting down. Probably another simple solution im missing out on again.

Hi, I'm a bit worried about the bad cylinder problem.
Such defects (bad sectors etc) weren't unusual in the MFM/RLL HDD era (below 100MB), but really shouldn't be able to show up with such high-end EIDE HDDs anymore.

Because, the HDD's on-board computer does use spare sectors to mask them before DOS even can detect them.
Strictly speaking, early 90s HDDs had that capability already.

If it's not a HDD defect, it could be a mismatch between drive geometry.
DOS 6.x uses BIOS and isn't LBA aware yet (doesn't care), while DOS 7 is LBA-ware it still uses BIOS, too.

Which in turn will accept the values being either given or the values it sees during auto-detect.
Windows 95, the graphical environment, uses its own Protected-Mode HDD driver to determine drive geometry.
The problem with the HDD driver is, that it may not have same limitations as the BIOS has.

So there can be a mismatch between the DOS and Windows personality of Windows 9x, causing data corruption.

If a DDO is at work, it should be a version that Windows 95 is aware of. And vice versa.
Yes, Windows 95 has DDO support. There's a patch for this (DMPATCH).

Re: SD/CF to ide CHS setup

I can't remember all the details anymore, though. That was the 7+ years ago.