Acermate 486 DX 66 MHz cannot detect 540Mb hard disk 1

[neo74]

I'm trying to hook up a 540Mb hard disk to an Acermate 486 DX 66 MHz. It's a Seagate ST3660A model hard disk.

In the BIOS Setup screen, I chose to autodetect hard disk and everything was OK.

The BIOS shows the correct amount of sector & cylinders.

But upon exiting the BIOS setup, the PC wouldn't boot. Instead it keeps showing:

Invalid system disk.

Is this due to hard disk size? I'm not sure of the maximum size for hard disk that the Acermate 486 DX 66 MHz can support.

Does anyone have any idea on how to solve this problem?

Thanks in advance for your help.

 

[CitrixEngineer]

I would guess that the drive is not formatted, or has no system files on it. If you boot from a floppy, can you see the disk in the fdisk utility?

I hope this helps CitrixEngineer@yahoo.co.uk

 

[neo74]

Thanks for the tip!

I booted up using a boot disk, then using FDISK, I repartitioned and reformatted it. (format c: /s)

After that, the PC could boot up nicely using this hard disk.

Thanks again for your help!