On every factory new card I used, I had to run fdisk/mbr once to make it bootable.

I actually tried that first, but it didn't help for me.

8bitbubsy wrote:

I actually tried that first, but it didn't help for me.

I see, that's a shame.

Some time ago I bought Texas Travelmate 4000M.
The laptop was in very good condition, but the hard drive was damaged. Unfortunately, the floppy disk drive also failed due to a broken belt.

I took care of the cosmetics of the case, then replaced the CMOS battery.

Finally, it was time to install the operating system and test the machine

I had no experience using CF cards in old computers and this was where my struggles began.

I bought a decent CF Transcend CF180I from industrial cards product line. I took into account the potential partition size limit.
So I chose the 512 MB model. I thought it would be possible to boot in this case without an additional disk manager overlay.

Unfortunately, it was not possible to boot with this card on this device. I decided to check another laptop.
The card worked on Toshiba 440CDT and the laptop booted, I installed MS-DOS 6.22.

I decided to use Ontrack Disk Mananger 9.57 but an additional difficulty was the lack of a functional floppy drive in 4000M.

So I prepared the CF card on that Toshiba laptop and I later moved her to Texas.
Unfortunately, I was disappointed that Travelmate did not boot again.
Under no circumstances did the SLC card want to work with Texas and the old Phoenix bios.

So I bought the popular Transcend 133X (TS2GCF133) card with a capacity of 2 GB.
Fortunately, it started working with the laptop, but after using Ontrack Disk Mananger 9.57 , only the C partition was visible on both Texas and Toshiba.

Finally, thanks to some information from this forum, I used a different manager. It was Western Digital EZ-Drive 9.03W. And finally success.
Using this program, I managed to successfully create two partitions, 1 GB each, on this card. Partitions are visible and working properly.
The program itself had to use a dynamic overlay because the partition size exceeded 512 MB.

I also tested EZ-Drive on the CF 512 MB SLC card, but unfortunately it still does not work on Texas. Works great on Toshiba!
This card simply doesn't go well with Texas.

PS. I forgot to add that the Phoenix bios in Travelmate, of course, requires manual selection of disk parameters (if you use a disk other than a preconfigured one for which there is an appropriate record).
And so I chose mode 48. For Compact Flash card Transcend 133X 2 GB (TS2GCF133C), parameters are C- 3884, H - 16, S - 63.

PS2. In the case of the SLC industrial CF Transcend 512 MB card not working in Texas, I tried several tricks, including the fdisk/mbrm command, using the Samsung ClearHDD application, different partition sizes, etc. It didn't help.

I guess I haven't tried partitioning in a Linux environment with a Live CD. But I don't know exactly how to do it. What bootable Linux disc to use, what commands.

Maybe the above knowledge will be helpful to someone. There are many threads about problems with configuration and booting of CF cards.