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dankcomputing · 09 March 2023, 05:36

I've been smashing into this brick wall over and over again for weeks. I have a 2386 Bridgeboard that I've been trying to set up. It's floppy controller got battery fried but the rest of it works. Not that big a deal since I have to use an ISA I/O card for a hard drive anyway and those typically have floppy controllers on them.

The floppy controller on my ISA I/O card works just fine and the IDE controller works so long as you use a spinning rust hard drive of the appropriate vintage. Problem is, there's nowhere to put one as the Amiga side's CD and floppy drives take priority (the PC floppy drive I'm using is hooked up externally).

So that leaves CompactFlash, and I cannot get a single one of the dozens of cards I have on hand to work. I can make partitions in FDISK all day and they'll FORMAT OK in DOS. I can boot off of floppy and copy files over to my heart's content. However, the DOS 6.22 installer fails at the very end. If I just use FORMAT with the /s option (so it makes the drive minimally bootable) that will work. But it won't boot off the CF drive no matter what - I get the non system disk or disk error each time. This same procedure on a normal hard drive results in a perfectly bootable drive.

I have never seen a PC hate CompactFlash hard drives as much as this one. What's going on here?

09 March 2023, 05:36	#1
dankcomputing Registered User Join Date: Feb 2021 Location: u.s.a. Posts: 34	A2386 and CompactFlash I've been smashing into this brick wall over and over again for weeks. I have a 2386 Bridgeboard that I've been trying to set up. It's floppy controller got battery fried but the rest of it works. Not that big a deal since I have to use an ISA I/O card for a hard drive anyway and those typically have floppy controllers on them. The floppy controller on my ISA I/O card works just fine and the IDE controller works so long as you use a spinning rust hard drive of the appropriate vintage. Problem is, there's nowhere to put one as the Amiga side's CD and floppy drives take priority (the PC floppy drive I'm using is hooked up externally). So that leaves CompactFlash, and I cannot get a single one of the dozens of cards I have on hand to work. I can make partitions in FDISK all day and they'll FORMAT OK in DOS. I can boot off of floppy and copy files over to my heart's content. However, the DOS 6.22 installer fails at the very end. If I just use FORMAT with the /s option (so it makes the drive minimally bootable) that will work. But it won't boot off the CF drive no matter what - I get the non system disk or disk error each time. This same procedure on a normal hard drive results in a perfectly bootable drive. I have never seen a PC hate CompactFlash hard drives as much as this one. What's going on here?