Anyone tried installing to a recently made SATA HD on a relatively recent
machine, pre-UEFI, but not upwards of a decade old?

I thought I knew how:

1-Set BIOS to legacy/compatible HD mode
2-Put the HD on the first port
3-Partition so DOS target is first primary, but with modern 64 head 32 sector
"geometry", including empty first 1M "cylinder"
4-Make it a compatible size (e.g. 252M)
5-Make its primary active
6-From floppy boot do FDISK /MBR, and
7-FORMAT C: /S

From floppy boot C: is usable, but the machines wouldn't boot from it. I
tried in 2 machines with very different BIOS and get same failure every time.
I tried FDISK /MBR from MS DOS 7.1 floppy boot, but it allowed the same
failure. What am I missing?

I replaced the DOS MBR code with OS/2 MBR code. That gets DOS to boot from C:.

Even so, getting DOS to use more partition(s) on the 1T HD seems impossible.
Creating primaries of only (FAT) 252M, (non-DOS) 1M, (non-DOS) 1M and logical
of (FAT) 64M in type 0x05 extended results invalid drive specification
attempting D: access with DIR or FORMAT, even though FDISK shows the DOS
logical at correct size. :-(
--
"The wise are known for their understanding, and pleasant
words are persuasive." Proverbs 16:21 (New Living Translation)

 Team OS/2 ** Reg. Linux User #211409 ** a11y rocks!

Felix Miata  ***  http://fm.no-ip.com/

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