Second Hard Drive

[mps69_1999]

Hi…. I’m new to this board, and I hope you guys can help me out.
I’ve just acquired a second hard drive for my PC, not a huge one might I add 2 to 3 G. The problem is when I try to boot my system back up after installing it. The system seems to want to boot up from the A: drive, after I insert the boot up disk, it then asks for the Windows 98 start up CD. Ive tried this several times without any success. All the happens is I get A: >, and the system stops booting up. As soon as I disconnect the new drive the PC boots up as per normal. I have tried changing the Master/Slave setting but as yet nothing seems to work.
Any advice would be greatly received

[penta_chris]

Sounds to me like the second drive has an "active" partition (a partition with a boot flag) and your system isn't sure which one to boot from. Use fdisk or Ranish Partition Manager (http://www.ranish.com) to check that and remove the boot flag. Please post back and ask for help if you're not sure about using these tools. You can wipe out your hard drive and have to start over from scratch if you mess up here, but there are tutorials out there or we can walk you through it.

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I fight authority,
Authority always wins

[mps69_1999]

As I'm a complete novice at this I think a walk thro would be a great help.

[penta_chris]

OK. I just remembered that you can only add a boot flag using fdisk, you can't remove one.

So, to simplify the explanation, does the new hard drive have any data on it that you are worried about losing?

If "no", we can do a short, easy walkthrough to partition and format that drive without adding the boot flag.

If "yes", you'll need to use partman to remove the boot flag, and I'll have to pull out my copy to make sure I explain it right. Either that or go into DOS and copy the small drive's contents to a folder on the old drive, if there's room, and then partition and format the new drive without adding the boot flag.

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I fight authority,
Authority always wins

[mps69_1999]

As far as aware there is nothing on this new disk that I need, the person i got it from said that i might need to re-fomat it??, but he wasn't too sure. My only real concern is what I have on the orginal hard drive.
Many thanks again

[penta_chris]

My diagnosis is an educated guess,and a good one I think, but it's still speculation. Even if my diagnosis is wrong, my proposed fix won't do any harm, and a "complete novice" might learn something in the process http://www.PCGuide.com/ubb/smile.gif.

In other words, it wouldn't hurt to wait on someone else to back me up or tell me I'm on the wrong track here.

There's a great fdisk guide here (http://fdisk.radified.com/). Scroll down to "To make a Start-up boot disk:" which is about a third of the way down. Follow the all the directions in that section (4 paragraphs). Summing up, you'll make a start-up disk if you don't already have one, enter fdisk, and type "Y" to support large disk support. After creating the floppy and shutting down, but before rebooting, you'll want to hook up the new drive. Let's be on the safe side. Set its jumper as "master" and unplug the old drive altogether.

OK. Only the new drive is hooked up, we're in fdisk, and we've enabled large disk support (FAT32). When you're there (http://radified.com/FDISK/JPEGs/fdisk_options.gif), you'll want to use option 4 to display existing partition information. Write this down. It'll help you when you go back to the main menu by pressing Esc and choose 3 to delete the existing partition(s). This will bring you to a screen that looks like this (http://radified.com/FDISK/JPEGs/fdisk_delete.gif). Use the info you wrote down to delete any and all partitions, starting with the higher numbers (delete logical drives) and working your way to 1 (delete primary partition).

When all the existing partition info is deleted, press Esc to go back to the main menu (http://radified.com/FDISK/JPEGs/fdisk_options.gif). Choose 1 to create, and you'll be here (http://radified.com/FDISK/JPEGs/fdisk_create.gif). My advice here, if you never plan to boot from this drive, is to choose 2 to create an extended partition. You avoid some possible drive letter conflicts in the future, and fdisk will only boot flag primary partitions. Use all available space. You'll be prompted to create logical drives either immediately after this operation. Do so. for simplicity, create one using all the space. The menus here are fairly straightforward.

When you've created your partitions, press Esc to get back to the main menu and exit fdisk. You'll be told that you need to restart your machine before the changes take effect, so do so, with the floppy still inserted.

You're back at the a:> prompt. Type "format c:", hit enter, then confirm that's what you want to do by hitting "y" and enter. Give the drive a label if you'd like.

Next you'll want to turn your machine off, remove the floppy, configure the new drive to slave, the new drive to master, and hook them both up. Boot the system and hopefully you'll be on your way!

This is quite a process, as you can see. If you follow these directions carefully (you should prolly print this out), you shouldn't damage your system. I'd give it a day, though, to make sure pete, mjc, ghost-hacker, or someone else with thousands of posts around here doesn't come along and advise something else, or at least read through this long post to proof-check it. Good luck.

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I fight authority,
Authority always wins

[ski]

Some more things to consider:
-Make sure the IDE ribbon cable is securely and properly inserted. The red stripe along the one edge of the ribbon cable should be facing the power cable on the back of the drive.
-Make sure your BIOS is configured to automatically detect this hard drive.
-Ask the person that gave you the hard drive regarding any 3rd party overlay software installed on it so that it could be recognized by an older BIOS. If so, then this overlay has to be removed.
-Press and hold the Ctrl key during startup to get into the startup menu, select 'Command Prompt', press Enter, type fdisk/status at the C:\> prompt, press Enter. If you cannot see the HD's status, then it's probably bad.
If you can see the HD's status, then type dir at the C:\> prompt and press Enter to see if Windows is installed on it. If so, then disconnect the original HD, leave this one connected, and see if the system boots.

[classicsoftware]

First check the jumpers, again. Some drives require different settings for a solo drive as opposed to the master in master/slave setup.
Did you adjust the jumpers on the original hard drive? Check the web site of the original drive manufacturer for jumper settings.

If the jumpers are OK,

1) Disconnect the new drive.
2) Go to the web site of the NEW drive manufacturuer and download their diagnostic and partitioning software.
3) Create the disk with software.
4) Power off the system
5) Install the new drive.
6) Insert disk and re-boot.
7) Run the diagnostics
8) If it fails - it's toast
9) If it passes, follow the setup steps in the software.
10) You have a 2 drive system.

I find it is always easier to do this than to try to fdisk and format with dos commands, especially for a novice.

Good Luck