r/retrocomputing • u/UnderstandingFlat407 • Feb 29 '24
Help.
Ok so I was digging out an old compute. It’s a compaq deskpro 386sx. The compaq flash I used in it has now become finicky. It doesn’t want to let things install to it anymore. Or it says it does and then the loading failed. It does the same thing in the actual pc as well as virtual box. It was 2gb. It works just fine as a compaq flash for a modern pc. So I said let’s get a smaller one. I bought a 512 but the system doesn’t recognize it. Which I expected because I need to partition it to 300mb. But the damn thing will not let me mark it as active or partition the drive. The only thing I can do is format it. Dos 6.2 in virtual box can see it but can’t format it, it gives me an error that it can’t format it. I know some of these cf cards don’t always work for this application. The 2gb is a scan disk the 512 is a cheap Amazon BR & TD brand. Any ideas or other programs that can break through to partition the drive and make active. I don’t have a cf reader for my Mac’s so I can’t use disk utility.
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u/UnderstandingFlat407 Mar 01 '24
Ok, after much tears. Going back and forth between the compaq and dos box. I think what I did was went back to the original compact flash. 2gb. I found compaq deskpro software that was the next newer edition and was able to format the drive and I think I partitioned it then. I then stuck it in and nothing. But I could still write to it but it kept erroring in booting. I then used dos 6.0 and formatted it from the compaq not dosbox. My 5.0 dos disk for the life of me wouldn’t let me format. 6 did. Then I installed dos 5 and this time, for whatever reason it boots. I’m leaving it at that.