2nd hard drive here but not there...

[onamor22]

I have a dual boot system 98se & win2kpro sp4..This set up has worked for 2 years and with very few glitches. The 2nd hard drive shows in the bios and on the boot up in win98. It appears in My computer and in device manager, however it shows as a cdrom symbol in my computer..I have a dvd drive and cd burner also showing up and both work fine..when I click on the 2nd drive it shows no files and acts like it is a cd drive..The second drive is a slave on the primary master ide connector..(cable select)

When I boot into win2k everthing is fine, 2nd drive shows, I can read and run the files with no problem whatsoever...

Things I have done..
I disconnected the drive and booted up in windows and of course the drive does not show up...I then reconnected the ide cable and reboot, the problem is still there..New cable made no difference either..checked the primary ide controller in device manager, it says everything is ok. There is no disk management tool in win 98se that I can find..checked for virus, and malware..clean..

I have yet to try another hard drive as a primary slave (already tried a cable).

I just need another direction to try to see if I can fix this seemingly minor problem....No other problems of note are on this machine...will give specs if that seems relevant..

Thanks

[glc]

Is the Win2K drive FAT32 or NTFS?

[onamor22]

thanks for response, did not think of that possibility...however win 2k is fat 32 as is 98..this had been working for over 2 years in this configuration with no problems..

I do my whole disk backups by copying the entire hard drive to another identical hard drive, and that is what I did (norton ghost) as I have for the past 2 years..some time after this last evolution I noticed I could not access the 2nd drive in win98se..dont know if this is related to problem, as I seldom use second hard drive except as a recepticle for burning dvds...


Mike

[glc]

Is the partition marked active? You can check that with FDISK.

[onamor22]

the drive has 1 partition (100%) and it is marked active...it has been this way over 2 yrs in this configuration...going to try new ide cable today, and then the twin hard drive backup also to eliminate this as a cause...

Mike

[onamor22]

Well, I changed ide cable, no change in problem..

I then put the twin hard drive in BEFORE I had this problem..It has the identical contents as the other master primary drive..The problem with the slave hard drive still existed in win 98 but it still shows fine in win2k.

Finally, I put in a new primary slave drive (also cable select) and the problem is corrected..I suspect it is probably a controller in the defective hard drive that would not let it read properly in win 98, but it would let it read in win 2k..

Thanks glc for some insights on troubleshooting problem

Mike