What's up with my old hard drive?

[Ladygnome]

I know my hard drive could just be old, but I installed two hard drives into the Acer Aspire AMD PR-200 1274 machine. I fdisked, formatted the drives as they had been sitting for a while. I installed Windows 98 SE operating system. I rebooted a couple of times as I also installed some programs and stuff. We put in some additional RAM. Now it loads and says it identifies the RAM and it identifies the hard drives. However, it doesn't load past the information portion.
I checked the drives using FDISK and it says there is no partitian on the Master drive. I'm confused. Can all this stuff happen and then it just disappears? What could it mean? Am I just going crazy

 

[ski]

Did you partition the bootable HD with an active(primary)partition before formatting it?

Also, install just the primary bootable drive, get everything working, and then install the secondary one.

 

[Ladygnome]

Well I sure thought I had done it correctly, that's why I'm so bewildered. It's not the first time I've done this kind of thing. I'm going to start from scratch again. Is there any chance that this could happen to an older hard drive once it's been set up and windows is working, beyond human error?

 

[ceh4702]

This can be caused by things like a drive overlay program like EZ-Drive.

If you do not like my post feel free to point out your opinion or my errors.

 

[Ladygnome]

OK, here is an update. I was going to FDISK again and it kept hanging at 0%. Anyway, at some point we went to the hard drive connector and made a change. We had two hard drives and I think it was mixed up somehow with the CDRom.
Anyway, we can see the drive now, Windows and all and didn't have to reinstall Windows. However, I did have to replace the kernel32.dll as it kept giving us an error (perhaps my Windows installation has a problem?). We have another problem now though. It's showing 2 floppy drives and only one works. The BIOS indicates A: is there, but when you boot up, you have to access B: and A: is showing, but it hangs if you try to use it. What is this all about?

 

[ski]

Make sure that the FD is connected to the end connector, and not the middle one, on the data cable.