Hard Disk Problem: Need Help

[Arup]

Hi all
I need help on the following problem:
1) I have the Computer A with a Primary Master , CD-ROM etc. I attached a hard disk as Primary Slave. Then formatted the Slave Drive. From "My Computer" desktop icon, I can see C&D as Local Disk with used and free space of each respectively. The slave Drive, has nothing.

2) Now, I took out the slave drive from Computer A, change the jumper and connected to Computer B as Prmary Master. While Booting, I check the BIOS set up and it can detect the drive and provide info during booting. For booting the computer, I have used the BootDisk for Window 98 SE. It boots up and finally returned me to A:\> prompt.
At A:\> when I type C:
It returned " Invalid Drive Specification".

I can't explain why and so I wnat your help to solve this.

In addition, when this disk was in Computer A as a slave, then I boot up the computer even in MS-DOS. There, I have checked both C & D Drive and it works as normal. It gve C:\> and D:\> etc. Even, I copied some files from C Drive on to D drive (which is skllave in computer A, it works fine.

Question is Why the slave drive in Computer A is not recognized in Computer B? Am I missing something? Please help me out. Because using this drive, I will install the operating system in Computer B.

Sincere thanks for your help.

[Tahoe]

Try using cable select?

[Tahoe]

Did you try to reformat the drive w/ computer B?

[Arup]

I am using the downloaded bootdisk for boot up the Computer B.
The BootDisk I have downloaded from www.bootdisk.com does have FDISK.EXE but it doesn't have FORMAT. so I can't reformat the hard disk w/Computer B.

[Tahoe]

can you make a boot disk w/ Win98 from Computer A?

[RobD]

Are both computers the same style....eg tower or desktop?If one is a tower style system and the other a desktop you will have to format the drive in the pc in which it will be used,if the orientation of hard drives are different ie vertical or horizontal.In other words if the drive has been formatted in a horizontally mounted drive,it wont work in a vertically mounted drive.

[glc]

Rob: This is not true. A hard drive will work in any orientation. However, once you set a drive in a certain position, you should leave it that way because if you change it later, its life may be reduced or it may run very slow due to bearing wear patterns.

[mike breck]

Hi Arup,

What Windows versions are on these PCs?

If you are going to use the Slave drive as Primary Master with the OS on computer B, then using FDISK, you will have to put a Primary DOS partition on it and make this partition "Active".

Then you can Format the the Primary DOS partition (and any Logical drives, if you add an Extended DOS partition).

http://www.muisejt.com/fdisk/fdisk.html

It's easy to add format.com to your bootdisk.

If you are using Win9x, then you can find a format.com in the C:\Windows \Command folder. Just copy it over to your Bootdisk and you will be able to Partition and Format the HD.

It may be that you created an Extended DOS partition on the Slave drive or had a Primary DOS partition that you didn't make Active when you moved the HD to computer B.

Anyhow, better to start from scratch again with the HD already installed on computer B. The partitioning, making Active, and Formatting may be less confusing that way.

HTH

[Cricket]

H Arup,

The easiest thing to do would be to go into Computer B's BIOS and set the first boot device to the CD-ROM drive and boot to the Win98SE CD. From there you can fdisk and format the hard drive and then do the OS installation.

FYI: You can make a really nice startup/boot floppy from the Win98SE CD. Put the Win98SE CD into a working Win98 computer and use Windows Explorer to seek out \tools \mtsutil \fat32ebd \fat32ebd.exe and double click on the file. Have a formatted floppy ready and follow the instructions. I use this startup/boot floppy rather than the regular Win98SE startup disk as it doesn't create a RAM drive (which moves the CD-ROM drive letter).

Cricket