butjer1010 wrote on 2024-09-15, 18:42:

I had similar problem many times, i guess we all had. Maybe You could try the thing i did when i was desperate. I have connected 2GB CF card to "newer" pentium I system, and wrote the configuration data of CF in BIOS (heads, cylinders,....) - Normal, Large and LBA data. Than i tried to set HDD user settings on older 286 PC, and actually i managed to solve same problem (not booting to DOS). Of Course, I always did FDISK /MBR between trying other settings.... If You have those smaller CF cards, maybe You could try....
Good Luck

I can try that. Any particular brand of 2GB CF card you recommend or will the no one ones from China work just as well?

Tempest wrote on 2024-09-15, 20:02:

butjer1010 wrote on 2024-09-15, 18:42:

I had similar problem many times, i guess we all had. Maybe You could try the thing i did when i was desperate. I have connected 2GB CF card to "newer" pentium I system, and wrote the configuration data of CF in BIOS (heads, cylinders,....) - Normal, Large and LBA data. Than i tried to set HDD user settings on older 286 PC, and actually i managed to solve same problem (not booting to DOS). Of Course, I always did FDISK /MBR between trying other settings.... If You have those smaller CF cards, maybe You could try....
Good Luck

I can try that. Any particular brand of 2GB CF card you recommend or will the no one ones from China work just as well?

I didn't use chinese cards, mine were Silicon Powers, and they worked perfect every time 😀
I just went to newer PC into BIOS, got to the IDE settings, and wrote down all 3 variants of HDD settings. I don't remember which settings worked for me Large or Normal, but i know LBA didn't worked on this 286 machine...

I ended up getting a 1GB CF card and it worked just fine after I did FDISK /MBR. Still a little wary that it's going to stop working, but for now it seems ok.

I have a 386 with an early version of the Phoenix Bios and it would not work with the startech cf adapter. I could see it as a HDD if I booted with a boot disk, but I could only read the file tree and not run files on it, nor could I boot from it.

However, once I got the XTide bios added to that system, the cf adapter just instantly worked as it should. I have tested various 2 and 4gb cf cards with it and they run with no problems. I haven't bothered testing anything larger as I have nothing on hand right now.

The startech adapter is a common one to use and I've had no issues running it with later PCs, like pentium 1 machines from 1996.

Tempest wrote on 2024-09-18, 15:40:

I ended up getting a 1GB CF card and it worked just fine after I did FDISK /MBR. Still a little wary that it's going to stop working, but for now it seems ok.

Great, now when You aquire a larger CF (like this 8gb You mentioned it doesn't work), try then the same approach. User settings - input all the data You saw on newer MBOs ( when MBO read all on auto detection 😀 ).