Ask old hardware and driver/configuration questions in Marvin. This forum is for DOS games on modern systems. Marvin, the Paranoid Android

Welcome.
I see the police got to you first. 😀
Sometimes I wonder if mr. collector is of help besides telling people they are posting at the wrong forum.

On an IDE HDD there are usually "drive parameters" like ,Cylinders, Heads, SPT, just write them on a piece of paper and enter them manually in your BIOS.

If i connect the IDE HDD, it won't boot at all and freeze at Starting MS-DOS. However, if i removed the HDD it will boot up with all MSCDEX running and i can access the CD-ROM.

To clarify, do you mean the 40GB drive is not formatted or partitioned yet when this happens?

On my Pentium 120 system, I was able to boot off my DOS 6.22 installation floppy, then have it format the 20+GB disk as an 8.4GB space, leaving the rest of the drive that it does not recognize as unused. Once that was done, fdisk to create four 2GB partitions, and it works great from that point.

But if your drive has jumpers for downsizing it, that might be something to try.

Thread moved to Marvin.

Could there be a BIOS update for your motherboard? Pentium 120 still leaves a chance there's a version somewhere that gives you support for larger disks.

Or use a Disk Manager (Maxblast, Ontrack...)

Thank you ! After i specify the drive parameters, everything is working now.