First post, by BobyTheDragon
Hello all! I should start off and say im new to the site. Though ive been lurking as a guest for a few months following old PC topics while I build a good old Pentium 3 Slot 1 system.
Anyway to my issue, I finally managed to get my hands on an SD card to IDE Adapter to get the system a somewhat proper modern HDD. Followed with a 64 GB Kingston SD Card.
I formatted the SD card with msdos and a fat32 partition of 40 GBs (Leaving 22 GBs so that the SD card never thinks its full and causing slow downs), Making sure the sector size was 512 mbs. Copied the Heads, Sector, Tracks data from Gparted to enter into the motherboards BIOS (Auto-detect would cause the system to freeze up).
However on every restart, The motherboard reports a "Primary Master Hard Disk Failure" and Windows 98 Setup reporting that there are no hard disks installed in the system.
The system specs are as followed:
FIC VB-601-V REV 1.4 (VIA 440BX Chipset, Award Modular BIOS v4.51PG SV601V14 dated 19.07.1999)
512 MBs of RAM (2 * 256 mb PC133U Micron sticks)
Pentium 3 50mhz 100mhz FSB
ASUS V7100 (Based on the GeForce2 MX 400 chipset)
NEC USB card (Seems generic, No model numbers)
Soundblaster Live! Value (CB 4830)
Netgear Gigabit Networking card (GA311 REV A1)
Disk Drive, Floppy Drive and PSU are Generic (PSU Will be swapped to something more modern)
Troubleshooting attempts:
- Using a Quantum Bigfoot, System installed and booted fine
- Using a 80 GB Seagate SATA HDD with an adapter, Freezed on BIOS
- Using a 80 GB Seagate SATA HDD and limiting it to 64 GBs using Seagates Diskwizard program (Was a while back, Forgot the name), System installed and booted fine
- Using a 2 GB Generic SD card in the adaptor. System installed and booted fine.
- Using the 64 GB Kingston SD card in another PC. Windows xp reads and writes from it like a normal HDD with no issues.
- Attempting to use FreeDOS and 3 different DOS programs to detect the CHS configuration of the drive. Then using it in the BIOS. Freezed on BIOS, As well as reported the drive as only 8 GBs
I do know some 440BX chipsets limit the max HDD size to 32 gigabytes, However. I dont believe this is the case as a 64 GB hdd was detected fine by the system. The bios also supports LBA.
The only idea I have left is to get a 32 GB sd card. Sadly I cant return the 64 GB sd card as its already been opened from packaging 🙁. Anyone have any clue on what I could be doing wrong? Happy to answer any questions if ive missed something.
EDIT:
Completely forgot to list the SD card adaptor! Its a "FC-1307 SD to CF Adapter V1.4" according to BIOS and Windows XP device manager (When testing the 64 GB card on another machine). With a model number SD35VC0