Lol, yeah it is a pain to do drive formatting from within thse older OSes. But for anything i install to flash media, I make the partitions with a Linux Live CD / USB since there are plenty that boot just fine on 32 bit systems and anything with a somewhat recent Linux kernel will properly align the flash media to 4k. This is why for my FreeDOS / 98SE machine I prepared the CF on another computer and then installed everything to the drive.

I find GDISK a lot better than the DOS FDISK for managing partitions in DOS. Not as buggy as FDISK, works a lot faster, and more flexible.

Deczor wrote on 2020-02-21, 23:33:

SOLVED! […]
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SOLVED!

Thanks for all the input guys. I really appreciate it.

I now have a working floppy drive, so what I did was:

- Chuck CF card into 486 with floppy drive.
- In BIOS set the drive to the standard config thing that's common.
- Run fdisk, and when prompted set the max drive partition size to 504mb.
- Install DOS as normal.
- Run the Maxtor drive overlay software on the card and set it to two 1gb partitions (couldn't get any of the other overlay software to work)
- install DOS again when prompted by the overlay software.
- Done. It verks in the 486 and I can just chuck it in the Win10 machine and copy whatever. Win10 recognizes it as 2 1gb partitions.

On the down-side, the version of Dune I downloaded is in French. Need to find an english one.

I'd forgotten how annoying these machines are to work on. So far I've cut my thumb twice on the chassis. Next step is to strip it down, round all the sharp edges inside the case, put as quiet a fan as I can find in the PSU, then make some kind of nice CF card reader slot for the front so I don't have to go under my desk to swap out the cards.

few years later, but thanks for this, it worked 😀