Hi There

having a bit of trouble with hard drives on my pc.

I have 2, 1 fujitsu 10 gig on ide 1 on the mobo containing OS and programs, 1 IBM 60 gig full of data (mostly cubase music and digi photos running on a promise ultra ata 100 pci controller card (had to do it this way as mobo wasn't happy with big drive and to get the full ata 100 performance out of it)

My ibm hdd has started screwing up (many bad disk errors so i phoned the supplier got an rma number and am in the process of backing up its contents before sending it back for replacement. 60 gig takes a long time to back up!) Some of the more important stuff i've put on spare space on my c: fujitsu for convenience and deleted from the ibm drive.

My pc has decided not to boot into windows (98) now, gets into the bit when white screen comes up and hangs. I've been here before though and its just a case of a reinstall to get up and running. Just happens after a while when i've messed with the drivers etc for about a year (tinker tinker to get cubase running better)

My prob is that i want to be able to see my big 60 gig hdd on the promise controller when i boot up from a boot disk so i can copy the stuff that i backed up onto the fujitsu back to the ibm temporarily while i reformat the fujitsu and start again! The promise card only seems to assign the ibm a drive letter when in windows so when i boot up to dos using a boot disk i can't see the ibm as a drive to do a simple xcopy and get it all back to how i want it!

any ideas how i would alter the boot disk to enable the promise card to give the ibm a drive letter so that i can be sane again? i guess its a driver thing probably but not sure.

alternatively any other suggestions for my confused brain?

cheers

John

My Promise Ultra33 and Ultra66 cards have a BIOS onboard which allows them to work under DOS with no additional drivers. When booting up, there is a text screen that reports this BIOS loading, and what hard drives are connected to the adapter. I don't know why your drive is not being recognized.

Hi Kenja

Yeah thats how i think it should work. The problem i think might be that my big ibm is my d:drive but when you load dos through the windows boot disk it creates a virtual d drive for the fdisk application etc. maybe my problem is as simple as finding a disk to boot to dos without creating the virtual d:drive. (showing my ignorance of all things dos!)

i'll have a look around thanks!

The virtual drive should take the next available letter.....which sould be e:... I think that would be a problem with the program that is used to create the RAMdrive. You can't assign a drive letter to it...but you can edit the autexec file on the bootdisk and change the programs.....or check here (http://www.bootdisk.com) to see if the have one with what you need....


------------------
mjc
Links list:Computer Links (http://www.dreamwater.org/tech/mjc/index.htm)

Celts are the men that heaven made mad, For all their battles are merry and their songs are all sad.