Get a controller that accepts drives up to 8gb and any solution from there is limited to only remapping software. Chances are that you got a board that is limited to only 504mb.

Yea a promise IDE controller should do the job.

I do have a 386, but was able to create a 512MB partition on a 2GB CF card. I don't remember the steps however I did nothing "special".

This is a compact 486 with only three ISA slots I don't want to populate with IDE controllers etc. (saving space for sound cards). Maybe I will try making a smaller DOS primary partition, or buy myself a 256 Mb CF card...

Try the XTIDE bios http://code.google.com/p/xtideuniversalbios/ The 1.1.5 version allows HDD/CFs up to 8GB in size, the 2.0.0 Beta 3 allows greater than 8GB. You'll need to burn it into an EPROM (27C256) and then insert it into something that has a bootrom socket, such as most ISA network cards. I'm using V1.1.5 on my Amiga A2286 bridgeboard and running DOS 6.2 on a Transcend 8GB CF card, booting from the IDE port on my SB16 soundcard.

I will barely go XT-IDE BIOS way, since it requires an ISA slot to become busy with a network card, which I wouldn't otherwise need.

Long story short, I turned off LBA mode on a Pentium-3 mobo (dumb me! should've turned it off from the very beginning!), and managed to format the CF card in CHS mode to a volume of 528 MB (504 MiB, which is 1024 cylinders, 16 heads, 63 sectors). It now works both on Pentium-3 and on 486, but... no boot from it. I can read, write, fdisk, format it on both systems, but when it comes to boot, everything hangs.

I bought myself another CF card - a 512 Mb Kingston CF/512FE, but things are even worse with it - the 440BX BIOS won't see it at all.

Any proven CF card models to work with? I think it could cost a fortune to find one if I just buy different CF cards one after one.

Be sure that the CF card is set as a Fixed disk...you may use some utilities, but using FDISK is what i recommend.

And be sure that the afterwards partition is set to Active.

Yea and also try fdisk /mbr

I have a primary DOS partition formatted as FAT16 and sized 528 MB (504 MiB). It has been set active automatically after its creation.

Will try that 'fdisk /mbr'. But how do I set the card as 'fixed disk'? Is it done with fdisk or some other way?

bristlehog wrote:

I can read, write, fdisk, format it on both systems, but when it comes to boot, everything hangs.

Sorry to break the unfortunate news, but I have never seen a PhoenixBIOS that could reliably boot from CF cards, see notes at http://gabucino.be/inv.htm). They hang when reading more than 512 bytes (yes, bytes). Some can be slightly better than the other, I did have moderate success with installing LILO and booting from an MS-DOS floppy image loaded in RAM with the "memdisk" utility which LILO can use. But accessing the CF will be unstable. The best way is to circumvent it, and using LILO or maybe GRUB to boot something that evades the BIOS, like a (contemporary) linux...

PhoenixBIOS is simply bad.

EDIT: you could try smaller (8-64mb) CF cards, I seem to recall I had more success with those.

Just something that people might find useful!

Got a new 32GB CF card for my TimeMachine.

I boot a W98SE boot floppy and launch fdisk. Delete the existing partition and reboot. Create a new partition FAT32 entire volume. Reboot.

Format the partition with format C: /s

Reboot and the machine hangs just before booting (DMI something something).

Boot the floppy again and use

fdisk /mbr

Now it boots.

So it seems that brand new CF cards need

fdisk /mbr

to boot 😀

Alas, I tried fdisk /mbr on that CF recently, but got an error. It seems either the card or the adaptor can't work with MBR.

Yea you seem to have other issues entirely 😀

not all CF cards implements the IDE protocol fully... this list could be of help:
http://www.tarkan.info/20080506/blog/iflash-c … ity-help-needed

Mau1wurf1977 wrote:

Just something that people might find useful! […]
Show full quote

Just something that people might find useful!

Got a new 32GB CF card for my TimeMachine.

I boot a W98SE boot floppy and launch fdisk. Delete the existing partition and reboot. Create a new partition FAT32 entire volume. Reboot.

Format the partition with format C: /s

Reboot and the machine hangs just before booting (DMI something something).

Boot the floppy again and use

fdisk /mbr

Now it boots.

So it seems that brand new CF cards need

fdisk /mbr

to boot 😀

Yeah, fdisk /mbr does seem to do the trick with some CF cards.

None of my "fast" CF cards would boot in my 486, only my slow Kingston one. But after fdisk /mbr, both my two other (Sandisk 150x and Transcend 133x) cards work just fine. The util for setting fixed disk mode doesn't want to work on either of these cards however, so not sure what's wrong. I've also got a nice Kingston FCR-HS3 memory card reader for transferring files, but after having the cards plugged into this, it seems I sometimes need to do the fdisk /mbr again afterwards to get them to boot in my 486.

That's awesome 😀

Screw me! I bought myself a Socket 8 Intel VS440FX motherboard, and it boots from that CF (with the same CF-IDE adaptor) perfectly.

Unlike P3 (Award BIOS) and 486 (Phoenix BIOS) boards which failed to boot, this one has AMI BIOS. It could be the clue... or not.

bristlehog wrote:

Screw me! I bought myself a Socket 8 Intel VS440FX motherboard, and it boots from that CF (with the same CF-IDE adaptor) perfectly.

Unlike P3 (Award BIOS) and 486 (Phoenix BIOS) boards which failed to boot, this one has AMI BIOS. It could be the clue... or not.

I used to have tons of those problems with my SD cards. So i booted my Linux Mint installation and used GParted to format and partition my SD Cards. And like that they started to work.

Did you use that Linux tool to format your cards in FAT16 mode and make them DOS-bootable?

bristlehog wrote:

Did you use that Linux tool to format your cards in FAT16 mode and make them DOS-bootable?

Yep