Hard drive question

[Karnevil9]

In another post I mentioned that I was taking a hard drive running 98SE out of a computer that crashed, to place in another computer and retrieve the files. I tinkered with the crashed computer today and found that all that caused it to not work was a bad ram chip. I removed the ram and it worked fine. I put the hard drive back into it to see if it worked, but on boot up after it ran all the test it said no operating system detected. I went into the bios and found that the drive was not listed. Set it to auto and still nothing. Set it to user and set parameters and still it says no operating system found. When I go back into bios it says there is no drives found either primary master or slave. Strange enough it says the same thing for the CD-rom which is on the secondary IDE. Under drives it list None. Everytime I set it and go back to bios later, the IDE devices are listed as none.

I tried to use a 98 floopy boot disk to see if it would bring up the system and it reads no vaild fat, or fat32 partition on found.

The hard drive is recognized when I slave it on my comuter running windows XP pro, but not when it is placed back in the computer it came out of. This is a system that is connected through a LAN at a college, so they usually download their operating systems from the adminstrators site. Would that make a difference to it's boot up. The files show windows 98SE is there. Any Ideas of the cause.

[morriswindgate]

Start the computer with a bootdisk and at the A prompt, type FDISK. Once you have gotten into FDISK make sure that the Partition is set to active.

[glc]

If the bios or POST doesn't see the drive, neither will FDISK. You have a hardware issue, check the jumpers, try a different IDE cable, try putting it on the secondary controller. Review the bios settings to make sure the controllers are enabled.

[Karnevil9]

I did try FDISK /STATUS previously, before morriswingate posted his response. It didn't work, but I don't remember the exact error message it gave. I am thinking that it is not the IDE cables since this seems to be happening with the CD-rom drive also which is running on the secondary IDE slot. Though I am going to swap that drive out. Possibly it may be bad. I will go back into bios to see that everything is enabled but I thought I had already done that. Doesn't hurt to double check though.

I apologize that I did not get back to morriswingate sooner, but I had the Hardrive back in the other computer so I could continue swapping files out. I got all the files off so sometime today I will swap it back to it's original copmputer and see what happens. This might have to wait until the after the GIANTS game though :)

[glc]

Remove all other IDE devices - it's *possible* that the CD drive is shot and is killing the controllers.

If this is a WD drive, remember that jumpering it to "master" when it's standalone will cause this.......you have to remove the jumper or use CS.

[Karnevil9]

Thanks for the info on the WD drives. I didn't know that and may have it set as master.