VOGONS

Booting from a 32GB CF Card

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First post, by bstar

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I'm trying to boot from a 32gb CF card in DOS, but the machine always crashes after the system status table thing on boot. Some details...

- Motherboard is a Biostar Socket 3, DX4 100 build- jumpers are all correct. This is my exact same board: Biostar MB-8433UUD-A
- Drive detects correctly in the bios (using a Transcend UDMA7 32gb card)
- Using DOS 6.22
- Set active partition in Fdisk and set partition size to 2047
- If I boot from a floppy boot disk, I can partition and format the CF drive in question to FAT16
- Doesn't matter if I format with /s or install DOS 6.22, the boot sequence always fails
- If I use a boot disk, the drive seems to work perfectly fine, it's just not bootable
- I have gotten these CF cards working (and booting) with the Quantum HD Overaly, something I really don't want to use
- I have no issues booting with my 1gb and 2gb CF cards. I have 10 of these 32gb cards (wife's DSLR storage), and they all have the same issue.

Really hoping I can figure out what's going on here since it's nearly working perfectly. I would hate to have these cards go to waste. Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

Edit: Fixed, I needed to run fdisk /mbr.

Last edited by bstar on 2022-04-29, 18:45. Edited 1 time in total.

Reply 1 of 4, by weedeewee

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I'd try this...

Clear the first Megabyte of the CF card on another computer using HxD or dd (linux) and then use the card on your Biostar board for setup, partitioning & dos install.

Right to repair is fundamental. You own it, you're allowed to fix it.
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Reply 2 of 4, by bstar

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weedeewee wrote on 2022-04-29, 18:07:

I'd try this...

Clear the first Megabyte of the CF card on another computer using HxD or dd (linux) and then use the card on your Biostar board for setup, partitioning & dos install.

Will do, this is what I suspected, but I also read that formatting with /s should circumvent this issue.

Reply 3 of 4, by weedeewee

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formatting with /s just copies the system files over after the format is done.
you might be thinking of fdisk /mbr, but that just rewrites the MBR.

I've noticed that hdd/partition info which dos sees can be different due to already existing partition info and mainboard autodetection, which often leads to these, not booting, scenarios.

anyway, I hope it helps in getting it working.

Right to repair is fundamental. You own it, you're allowed to fix it.
How To Ask Questions The Smart Way
Do not ask Why !
https://www.vogonswiki.com/index.php/Serial_port

Reply 4 of 4, by bstar

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weedeewee wrote on 2022-04-29, 18:25:

formatting with /s just copies the system files over after the format is done.
you might be thinking of fdisk /mbr, but that just rewrites the MBR.

I've noticed that hdd/partition info which dos sees can be different due to already existing partition info and mainboard autodetection, which often leads to these, not booting, scenarios.

So yeah, I confused /s with /mbr... I realized this earlier and just finished installing DOS with a successful boot. That was indeed the problem. Thanks for your help, definitely got me second guessing that /s affects the mbr.

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