First post, by DeadnightWarrior
- Rank
- Newbie
Hi all,
I'm really starting to lose faith here.
What I'm trying to do is give a new life to a very old system I had lying around, the specs of which are as follows:
- AMD Duron 750Mhz
- Gigabyte GA-7ZMM based on Via KM133 chipset.
- 256 Mb ram PC133
- S3 Savage 4 - integrated
- Creative CT5880 (a.k.a. PCI128) - integrated
- An LG IDE DVD Rom drive
- A 3.5" floppy drive
- THIS SD card to Compact Flash adapter, THIS Compact Flash to IDE adapter and an old SanDisk 2Gb microSD card.
- A WD800AAJB 80Gb IDE hard drive (new and sealed)
Now, no matter what master/slave/cable or which boot floppy/CD I try (DOS, FreeDOS, Windows 98, Windows Me, Damn Small Linux, Lubuntu... you name it), the 2Gb card is either:
- not detected
- auto detected as 32Mb
- manually set with various C/H/S values but still seen as 32Mb
and there's NO WAY I can get past fdisk and format it.
Similarly, the 80Gb hard drive is not detected at all or reported as 8Gb.
Please note:
- If I slap the SD on a USB adapter and connect it to my current Win10 system, I can do whatever I want with it (partition, format, resize, etc.)
- The SD was wiped, zeroed and was totally unpartitioned when I put it in the CF adapter.
- I'm running the latest motherboard BIOS from 2001.
- An old 40Gb IDE hard drive never had any issues with that very same motherboard.
Right now the SD/CF is primary master (top 80 wire cable), the hard drive is primary slave (middle 80 wire cable) and the DVD is secondary master (top 40 wire cable). Tried every other master/slave/cable combination and the situation got worse or didn't improve.
I'm guessing the BIOS is the main suspect here. Still, it has LBA mode and it should manage at least 40Gb drives natively (see above). Also I specifically used a 2Gb card to avoid issues with DOS.
I think I'm left with three options:
- Get a proper SD -> IDE adapter
- Get a real 2Gb CF card
- Scrap the platform altogether and look for a Socket 370 / 478 motherboard (but which one?) as I should have a couple of S370 CPUs (I believe a 866 Coppermine PIII and a 1.3 Tualatin Celeron) and at least an S478 (shoud be a 1.7 Willamette P4).
What should I do before throwing everything out ot the window?
Thank you very much!