stanwebber wrote on Yesterday, 13:06:

i read this whole thread & i'm still confused. did the OP ever get a cf card aligned to 2048 sectors to boot in his 386 machine? […]
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i read this whole thread & i'm still confused. did the OP ever get a cf card aligned to 2048 sectors to boot in his 386 machine?

i'm running into this same issue right now with an early p54c pentium bios. is the limitation bios or dos related?

this CAN work with dos 7.1 & fat32 on an award kt133a bios. i partition either a sata ssd or cf card with gparted aligned to 2048 sectors and the os just boots. the only problem i ran into was dos not recognizing a logical drive in an extended partition unless it was cylinder aligned with dos tools.

now i have a fat16 1gb cf card that will not boot in my p54c pentium machine unless i partition it with dos fdisk. when previously partitioned with gparted aligned to 2048 sectors, dos had no problems recognizing the drive from a boot floppy--just no boot.

what is the magic for alignment? if rmprepusb is the answer, what is it doing differently that gparted isn't?

The moral of this whole thread is that there is no point to partition align FAT/FAT32 volumes to 2048 sectors. This approach works in case of NTFS since the metada is part of the file system but it does not work in case of FAT/FAT32 since the metadata/header is before the file system so proper alignment works differently
(from here: Re: MS-DOS with aligned partitions on CF card, is it possible?)

Falcosoft wrote on Yesterday, 13:24:

The moral of this whole thread is that there is no point to partition align FAT/FAT32 volumes to 2048 sectors. This approach works in case of NTFS since the metada is part of the file system but it does not work in case of FAT/FAT32 since the metadata/header is before the file system so proper alignment works differently
(from here: Re: MS-DOS with aligned partitions on CF card, is it possible?)

truth be told, i'm not sure i understand why it's important for ANY flash media to be sector aligned. this whole alignment business started with mechanical hdds switching to physical 4k sectors and using a translation layer to present 512b sectors to the system bios. does all flash media do the same thing?

stanwebber wrote on Yesterday, 13:06:

i read this whole thread & i'm still confused. did the OP ever get a cf card aligned to 2048 sectors to boot in his 386 machine?

Some time later i eventually found YSDDT. As far as i can confirm, it does what needs to be done - it realigns the FAT16 partition and DOS is able to boot from it after the alignment.
You need to use quite a lot of flags on the program to run it. Have a second screen with manual ready. With flash memory, do not forget 'fatusedonly' along with other flags!
Also, you sometimes need to override some parts of partition info using 'fatnew*' or 'fatuse*' flags.

It seems to be working, but i don't have long-term extensive experience with it, yet.