China DOS Union

My hard drive can be detected on a 586 or higher machine,
but on a 386 or 486 machine it cannot be detected. (Before it was formatted, it could be detected, but after formatting it could not. I used the FORMAT.COM that comes with DOS 3.31 to format it.)
I bought my hard drive together with the same 486 machine.

Question: I want this hard drive to be detected on a 386 or 486 machine. Is there any way?

If your hard drive is relatively large,
the 386 or 486 may need a BIOS upgrade

My hard drive is 428M

My hard drive was on a 486 machine,,
it had originally been working fine,
I took it out and formatted it once, and then it could no longer be detected by the 486 machine.
(I used the FORMAT.COM in MSDOS3.31 to format it.)
Now I want this 486 machine to detect this hard drive again,, is there any way?

Try using a different formatting tool and format it again. The MS-DOS 3.31 version is too old and doesn't support this kind of hard drive.

When your 486 machine starts up, can it detect this hard drive? If it can, then just format it again. If it can't, then maybe there's a hardware problem.

First of all, your machine is relatively old, so your motherboard may not support such a large hard drive. Also, your partition format may not be right. They may all be FAT16, but their systems are different, and there may also be certain differences in the versions they use.