Win 98SE; display of hardware?

[moikulta]

In win98se, is a second HD supposed to be shown under "my computer"? And if so, then what steps are necessary to do that. Currently I have two hd's, both of which are maxtor, one is a 20g and the other is a 81g. The 81g is set up as master on one ide cable, and the other 20g is set up as master on the secondary ide cable, with my cd-rom as slave on that same cable. My 81g is partitioned into four 20g hd's, with c,d,e,f as the drive letters, and my cd-rom is drive g, and I have a 250mb external usb zip as h. But nothing is showing up for the other hd. Under device manager, all drives are being shown, and in my bios, auto detect is set. From what I can tell, everything is showing up, with the exception of the hd in my computer, and being able to access it. What am I missing?

[JL275]

Does it show up in the POST? I would try setting it as slave in Primary IDE. Has it ever worked or is this a new configuration? Maybe you had it as a slave before and forgot to move the jumper?

[moikulta]

Originally posted by JL275:
Does it show up in the POST? I would try setting it as slave in Primary IDE. Has it ever worked or is this a new configuration? Maybe you had it as a slave before and forgot to move the jumper?
Thank you for your reply..however you are correct on the fact that this is a new configuration. I have tried several ways to get this to work and yet no luck. Yes it does show up in POST. I am thinking that this is a win 98 issue, because the original config of the sys, is that the computer came with the 20g hdd with win98se originally installed on it. I bought the 81g hdd and wanted to transfer all existing data onto it, and keep the 20g for a minor backup temporarily. The software I used to format the new disk was from maxtor, and had a feature to mirror the hdd onto the new one. After doing this, I realized that would not work because then the original install of win98 would not recognize the rest of the 81g hdd. So I opted for a clean install, of course this too had it's flaws. The setup looked nothing like what I originally had, and so I was using my 250 zip to transfer files back to the 81g. Yes it is a chore to keep switching hdd's. Finally I have my 81g hdd with the setup nearly similar to the 20g, but cannot get access to the 20g. How is this normally setup? And what would putting the 81g as a slave in pri IDE accomplish?

[mjc]

Are the jumpers on the 20GB drive set correctly?

Does BIOS properly detect the drives and are they set to auto-detect?


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mjc
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[JL275]

I would try booting from a boot disk and see if you can see it in DOS. If you can format. Back up whatever you need onto the zip From what you said, it sounds like you have windows installed on both hard drives? Win98 originally on the 20 then a partial transfer of it to the 81. Personally I would format both drives, set the 20 gig as master on primary IDE, and 81 as slave on primary. Making sure the jumpers are set correctly.

That's just my opinion, maybe someone else has a better idea. http://www.PCGuide.com/ubb/smile.gif

[moikulta]

I want to thank your again for your reply...However, this has got to be the strangest thing. So here goes...
Initially as I had said physically, there should have been no reason why it didn't work. My first question was to make sure I wasn't imagining things when I thought that you should simply be able to partition and format a new hdd, install it correctly onto the Ide cable with the jumpers set correctly, and set bios. With all of that said, win98 should see the drive and allow for icons to be installed in My Computer. However that was not the case. So this is why I was writing to the people on PC Guide.
In the best interest of computer kinship, I will now let everyone know that the system is working as it is intended to. All is well. But that doesn't solve the problem of "Why".
After perusing the Knowledge Base articles at Microsoft for hours on end, I finally gave into calling Maxtor Tech support. This is where the saying "buyer beware" should definitly come in. The first tech rep I spoke with, indicated to me that I needed to have the UDMA 66 cables. Personally I will tell you from my experience, I don't physically see an actually increase in performance with the hard drives. But anyway, he says that Maxtor highly recommends these cables with certain drives, of which both of mine fall into that category. So I go and buy them, and install them and it's off to the races, right? Wrong. NO change. Hmmm....so I call back, and he says to change my jumper settings to J46 and J50 both vertical. I asked what is this config called, he says he doesn't know for sure, but knows it works. Okay...guess what...No change. Hmmmm....So then I call back again, this time I get a tech rep who acts like he knows everyting about computers. Ha ha ha...but he does this for a living, and I don't, so I will humor him. Big mistake. WORD OF CAUTION!!! I know none of us knows everything about computers, but what we do know, we know. And if something sounds wrong, it probably is. Trust your gut instinct. Anyway, we do an fdisk and look at the drive. Well, he says, your jumpers are set incorrectly, you need to set them to such-n-such. Oh really? That's odd, the last tech wanted them this way. Okay... Then he says that my drive is coming up wrong in my bios, and that after resetting the jumpers, I will have to repartition and format the drive again. OH NO!! Sorry he says. So reluctantly, I go ahead and do it. OOOOPS. There went all of my data on the hdd that I had already paid $35 to Microsoft to bring back up when I had a "problem loading gdi.exe, you must reinstall windows" error a few days prior. Thank you Microsoft Tech. He actually knew what he was doing.
Moving on....after doing what the tech at Maxtor wanted guess what? Yep, no change. Hmmmm...well I had to sleep on it after that. Then bright and early this morning, I decided to look into things myself again, and see if there was something I was missing. Well indeed, fdisk was not looking at my hdd correctly. It was calling it a 12g instead of an 81g. Big difference. But was that a problem with the disk, or the program. I was betting on the program. So I got a different floppy with a boot disk from win98 directly, and tried to format and partition it all over. No change. So then I went back and did it again with the MaxBlast software (which by the way is much better than stupid fdisk) and guess what, everything with the drive was reading correctly. So I did a double check of the whole system, the cables and jumpers, and proceeded to call maxtor again.
So this tech tells me that the only way my bios is recognizing my 81g hdd is because there is ez-bios installed on it. Oh really I say. Okay. Then he tells me to install ez-bios onto my 20g hdd, that way all the drives can recognize each other and all will be good. So I do it. Well, let's just say that all wasn't good. BUT, I did finally get the other drive to show up in My Computer. But at a price...it took just over 12 minutes for the computer to boot up, and then it went at a snails pace. I mean reeeeeeaaaallllyyy sssslllloooooowwwwwww. This just simply would not do. So I went back in with the ez-bios software to maybe "tweak" some things. Well, come to find out, ez-bios wasn't automatically isntalled by maxtor's software, and wasn't even on the 81g hdd. And after I disabled it on the 20g hdd, everything was working as it should. I couldn't believe it. So I went and uninstalled ez-bios on the 20g hdd. Now all is fine. What is the moral of the story? Hell if I know. I couldn't even begin to tell you what was making the fuss in my system or what happened to make it work. I do know this, I suspect the win98se. I have complete trust in my AMD Athlon processor, and the MSI mobo. In addition I trust the bios too. Until next time... http://www.PCGuide.com/ubb/biggrin.gif