VOGONS

Search

Common searches

Problem with CF card in Pentium laptop

Topic actions

First post, by OldCat

Posted on 
User metadata
Rank Member
Rank
Member

I have Panasonic CF-41 laptop with 256Mb Compact Flash card via adapter. Works like a charm, but I got greedy and wanted to have a bigger one (who doesn't?). And now I have a problem.

I bought 4Gb CF card and prepared 2Gb partition with FDISK (Primary, Active). I then used FORMAT C: /S in order to make it bootable. Installed MS-DOS 6.22 from original floppies without a hiccup. However, when I restarted the computer, it would not boot from CF card.

Instead I could see LILO (sadly, without STITCH) presenting me with enigmatic choice of RAMa1, a1 and Rebuild. First two choices display some thinking in form of dots (1st picture) and then restart computer:

liloandstitch_1.jpg
Filename
liloandstitch_1.jpg
File size
87.32 KiB
Views
268 views
File license
Fair use/fair dealing exception

The last one causes laptop to think for a longer time, followed by spectacular crash. What the heck?

liloandstitch_2.jpg
Filename
liloandstitch_2.jpg
File size
190.25 KiB
Views
268 views
File license
Fair use/fair dealing exception

I would be very grateful if someone could tell me what I did wrong and what I should do to fix it. It worked the first time with 256Mb CF, goshdarnit!

Reply 1 of 2, by Jepael

Posted on 
User metadata
Rank Oldbie
Rank
Oldbie

I presume you don't have LILO on your main hard drive of the laptop?

Maybe previous owner of the card had Linux or something else installed on the CF card, as there is LILO on the master boot record. You only repartitioned the card, but did not rewrite the master boot record so it can't boot the DOS on FAT partition.

Boot from dos install floppy, and use "FDISK /MBR" to rewrite boot code on master boot record. For that to work, the CF card needs to be the first hard drive in the system, i.e. fixed disk 1 if you go to FDISK to see which drives it sees. I think it will refuse to write boot code to fixed disk 2.

Go to top of page Go to top of page
Back to General Old Hardware
Close window
Close window