Boot from Floppy again and then run:

fdisk /mbr

That did the trick, Phil! Thanks so much. I never would have thought of that.

boxpressed wrote:

That did the trick, Phil! Thanks so much. I never would have thought of that.

I have to this for every new CF card 😀

Let me know how you go with the micro drive. I have a few Seagate, and found them to be very slow. Even on a 386 it holds up things.

That is a very nice looking motherboard - SiS496, PS/2 mouse, PCI, 1024K cache potential. What are your plans for it?

feipoa wrote:

That is a very nice looking motherboard - SiS496, PS/2 mouse, PCI, 1024K cache potential. What are your plans for it?

You know, I had it stashed away for about a year and didn't even realize that it was a combo VLB+PCI board. (I read that the SiS496/497 boards have poor PCI implementation, however, because PCI is tied to the VLB bus.) Right now I'm planning on using it on a bench to test these dozens of Socket 3 CPUs that I received last week. Seems like the bench is a good place for it right now so that I can test a variety of VLB and PCI video cards as well.

Do you think that more cache would make a difference if there is only 16MB of system memory (I have 256K cache now)?

It may be revisions of the SiS496/497 chipset which have this slightly slower PCI performance. I have a SiS496-based board which does not exhibit decreased PCI performance; this board also does not have a VLB slot. Another SiS496-based board I have contains the VLB slot and it does exhibit slower PCI performance.

It seems like someone just demonstrated on Vogons a few % performance increase with 256K vs. 1024K with little RAM. It is up to you to determine if it is worth the effort and frusturation. For me, it is always worth the effort.

philscomputerlab wrote:

Let me know how you go with the micro drive. I have a few Seagate, and found them to be very slow. Even on a 386 it holds up things.

How useful is Speedsys' HDD test? I'm not sure which other bench to try.

That's great. What is your take on it, meaning your impression when using it. Did you notice any pauses in games, or does it feel quite fast? If you used CF cards in the past, how does the CF "feel" compared to that?

I felt a little sluggishness when using it for 98SE, not so much in games but just general operations on the desktop. In a Windows system, I wouldn't use one as a permanent solution, but they're convenient to use for some quick testing.

For DOS systems, I'm fine with using them full time. They are fast enough for DOS games, although I would like to test one with a game that makes frequent disk access. That said, I think that these are fragile beasts. I just had a 4GB model kick the bucket on me while I was installing Descent 2 off a CD. With DOS installs, It's easy enough to just do a direct copy-and-paste onto a modern HDD as a backup.

I just picked up a new 4GB CF card for $2 at a thrift. I'll test it out and compare.

Couldn't get the CF card to work. Fresh from the package, I was able to boot off the A: drive and perform FDISK. I had to delete a non-DOS partition and then created a new 2GB partition. However, when I rebooted, the system hung right after the BIOS recognized the CF drive (correctly, as a SanDisk model). Not sure what happened. I can't even boot off the A: drive to do a format. Everything is fine when I put the Microdrive back.

What is the size of the CF card that you are having trouble with? I don't like to go above 8 GB on my PCI 486 systems.

It's 4GB. Weird how the system hangs just before the boot process, so I can't even run FDISK /MBR.

What happens if you go to the BIOS and manually specify a geometry? Of it you just set it to disabled?

alexanrs wrote:

What happens if you go to the BIOS and manually specify a geometry? Of it you just set it to disabled?

That was it, thanks. Can't believe I didn't try to enter the geometry manually. It just worked automatically for the Microdrive, so I thought it would do the same for the CF card.

Speedsys reports a hard drive speed of 1183.02 (compared to the 105.21 for the Microdrive).

Sorry for posting on this old thread.
I have the same GXA486SPM motherboard with corrupted BIOS, and I couldn't find any BIOS file for it on internet.
I would like to ask you if you can dump the BIOS if you still own the motherboard.
Thank you.