I try to install a new 30GB hard drive on my Mobile 500. It has a 100Mhz pentium CPU and had a 2GB drive installed.
The problem is that when a partition is ready on the drive, MS-DOS or PC-DOS floppies freeze when first accessing the drive (before the prompt).
I also used a small linux boot floppy (http://www.toms.net/rb) with ethernet support that boots correctly. I format the disk VFAT with this linux, transferred a 800MB file on it without problems. So, I think there is no hardware problem.
The other solution to make the drive work with MS-DOS (ver. 7), was to set the cylinder number in BIOS to 1024 (drive: 528MB).
I used the drive manufacturer's floppy to limit the size of the disk to 7999MB (the newest BIOS update only sees 8.5GB). No difference.
Anyone has an idea?