Difficulty adding CF card to PacBell Legend 20CD

[Juror22]

I have a PB Legend 20CD that mostly works - I've replaced the backup battery and added in a couple of sticks of RAM. It boots from the floppy into either MS-DOS 5 (the Packard Bell one) or 6.22, but it doesn't boot from the hard drive and as it turns out, I cannot get it to boot from a CF card either. It has one ISA slot open out of the three on the riser - one is taken by a standard sound card and the other by a Greystone quad IDE, ISA card (I'm guessing that isn't standard for a PB).

I've gone into setup and modified the setting for the board IDE channel 0 master to have User defined CHS of 993,16,63 to match the CF card capacity of 512 MB. When the DOS installer comes up for a floppy drive install, since it can't locate a suitable hard drive, I drop into DOS and try to fdisk /mbr the drive and it returns ' the master boot record was not written)
I have also tried using 4 different CF cards (a generic one, a SanDisk Ultra, a SiliconDrive and a Kingston), using two different CF adapters, two different floppy cables one of the CF adapters plugs directly into the MB. I even tried plugging into the Greystone card and disabling the MB IDE channels, but nothing has worked.

Any suggestions?

 

[Caluser2000]

It is possible the Greystone card was fitted because the onboard IDE was shot. That or it could handle larger size HDDs.

 

[Juror22]

I had the same thought (about a failed IDE channel). I can't find any docs on how to set it up though - the PB came to me as part of a hoard, along with a lot of software, disks and other pieces, but nothing that was related to the card and its set up. I suppose I should try a known, working HD to rule out issues with the MB IDE channel.

 

[Juror22]

Alrighty - I've been working on this intermittently for the past few weeks - I never did find a spare working IDE drive (All of mine are in use elsewhere and I didn't want to sacrifice any to this project yet). I spent some time doing research and since I had been using either DOS installation floppies or PB DOS install disks, I thought that I would look into getting PB Master CD's and their accompanying startup floppies. I was able to get a couple of close ISO and mdf images that I burned as well as the matching floppy images, which I turned into floppies, using the dd command on my MacPro. After playing with those a bit, I was able to get the system to boot, recognize the floppy and the master restore CD and from there I attempted to format the installed Conner 420MB drive.

Although that didn't work, I sorted out that the drive was connecting, but not working properly, so I thought I would use these tools to make another attempt to get the CF cards working. I started it up and set parameters for the CF card and started the master restore CD. I used the format command for the CF card and it returned an invalid command error, just like I had seen with the Conner drive, so I tried another different brand of CF card and the formatting worked.

Now that I had a working drive, I used the Master CD to do a restore and it is currently installing to the CF card. I still want to find an image of the correct Master CD (170210R4) - I am using 170210R3 and my exact product code is not on the earlier revision, so I am hoping that using the slightly different code that I had to use, doesn't cause issues, until I can get the correct CD and install from that. I am looking forward to playing with Win 3.11 again on real hardware, after all these years.

*EDIT*
After completing the install it would not boot. After poking around a bit, it occurred to me that after getting the card recognized and formatted, I had neglected to 'fdisk /mbr' the CF card. Once I did that, reformatted, and then reinstalled, it started up into the PB Navigator, along with Win for Workgroups 3.11. This has definitely been a journey, but it ended well, Woohoo!