Windows 98 will not recognize 2nd HD 1

[chente73]

I have a Gateway P166 that was running Win 95. I formated the HD and installed Win 98. Now Windows 98 will not see the 2nd HD. However, the BIOS recognizes both drives. I've tried FDISK to see what's going on, but it recognizes both drives as well. I can't FDISK the 2nd drive because data exists on it that I can't lose! Any help or ideas would be greatly appreciated. Thank you in advance.

 

[edfair]

what does fdisk tell you about the hard drives. Particularly about the second drive.

Ed Fair
efair@atlnet.com

Any advice I give is my best judgement based on my interpretation of the facts you supply.

Help increase my knowledge by providing some feedback, good or bad, on any advice I have given.

 

[ray436]

Are the 2 drives on the same chain?

If not.....I may be way off, but check and see if for some reason W98 has set the hard disk controller to having only one channel, or something else got IRQ 15.

(look in device manager under haed disk controller and check the setings, also check the IRQ allocations )

Ray

 

[bdux]

What was win95 file system as version B had a strange file system called HTFS that other versions of WINDOWS cannot recognise . You may have to install the version of win95 that was on it or stick hard drive in another p.c with the same w95 version and then copy the files to another hard drive temporarily or to a network drive temporarily that has been formated in fat or vfat . And then reinstall win98 and hope it reads the fat hard drive or network drive ok . Then fdisk - delete partion using old w95 operating system and create partion and reformat in w98 and then copy the previously copied files back to the newly formated drive .

 

[Guest_imported]

I've just been into this stuff with my dad's machine. We had a CD-rom show up inbetween the two hard drives. He had pulled two hard drives out of an old machine and just put them into this new P2/400. It has a beautiful Award Bios. What I don't think I ever realized about the BIOS was that under the Hard Drives config(4 spots in the bios). I had inadvertently turned off the AUTO config for a couple of drive spots. Make sure all 4 slots/spots whatever all say AUTO, and make sure LBA is turned on in last column on this screen. It's a possible problem. This is of course provided that you actually HAVE an Award BIOS.

We spent a few days working on this because I kept thinking it had something to do with IRQs or problems with devices in the Win95/98 Device Manager. That was not the case. It was something simple.

Use the KISS(Keep It Simple Stupid) philosophy and most of the time you find the solutions.

 

[chente73]

Thank you all for your help. We had to re-install Win95 and that seemed to fix the problem. Thanks again.