Hi again,
I think you have some more basic options to try first.
First of all, does your motherboard support auto detecting harddisks? You did not answer this question asked by some other guy, but it is a important question.
If your BIOS allows you to detect IDE drives automatically, you should use that facility. If the HDD deteted correctly, you have no 32GB limit problem, if not, either the HDD is DOA, or you really need to go for a disk smaller tan 32GB.
Second important thing is, are you sure that second IDE controller is enabled (and working correctly)? You can check by connecting the CD-ROM to first channel, adjusting it as a slave, and see if it can be seen
I don't believe you will have much problem with specific drivers and such, just find a windows 98SE sturtup floppy (there are many sites for that or I can email you the image directly if you pm me with your mail adress) I did not see any CDROM drives which cannot be loaded by 98SE startup disk.
There are also some other startup floppy images around, using more modern freedos drivers, and one with 10s of different cdrom drivers. I can send images of them to you too.
But first things first:
- Make your HDD recognized by the system, partition and format. Preferably with /S option (you need to boot from HDD - use autodetect and/or a drive smaller than 32GB). Remember that you don't need a real HDD for that option, a compact flash card with 1-2 GB capacity with an IDE/CF adapter (2-3 USD on ebay, shipment included) will work perfectly, I always use that combination for old CNCs
- Make your CDROM drive properly connected to a properly working IDE channel (be sure that CD-ROM is not DOA either).
- If you use a compact flash instead of HDD, you don't need a CDROM ever. Just copy everything into the card in a reader, all the w95 setup and required hardware driver setup disks. than ou can start everything from that card (format it with /S option first).
Then you can use any of the images (after copying them to a floppy of course.. 🤣 ) that I promissed to send you, boot with floppy, and copy win95 CD contents to your HDD, boot from HDD again and run setup from HDD.
Thats all.
And yes, booting from CD-ROM is not an option for all socket7 boards. The good thing is, you don't need to. 😁
GA-6VTXE PIII 1.4+512MB
Geforce4 Ti 4200 64MB
Diamond Monster 3D 12MB SLI
SB AWE64 PNP+32MB
120GB IDE Samsung/80GB IDE Seagate/146GB SCSI Compaq/73GB SCSI IBM
Adaptec AHA29160
3com 3C905B-TX
Gotek+CF Reader
MSDOS 6.22+Win 3.11/95 OSR2.1/98SE/ME/2000