Win98; 2nd hd messed it up, won't work anymore

[budbd]

I have my old gateway 333mhz machine all screwed up, has win 98. What happened is that my brother had a machine that has a 30 gig hard drive, and win millenium installed, and was corrupted, and had one of those chincy compaq "restore disks" that basically wasn't windows at all to restore.

So, he trashed it(threw most of it away in a rage), and removed the hard drive for me in case I could use it. Unfortunately for me, I turned on the gateway with my main hard drive connected as usual, but my other hard drive hooked up as well. SCREWED IT UP GOOD. I disconnected the 303 gig hard drive, too bad too, but now the machine says "invalid system disk".

Jeese, I can't seem to figure out how to get back into windows. Also, I tried everything to get use of the 30 gig hard drive, like fdisk it, and that did do give it a partition, but it won't format past 1%. I even deleted the partition, and it won't format past 1%. I even moved the jumper to all four settings to try to see if it would format, and that is a no way.

Of course, the main thing here is that the six gig hardrive that is orignal to the old Gateway was set up real well and just receently too, I hate to have to do a reinstall. Also maybe someone can tell me where I went wrong on the 30 gig hard drive that orignally had millenium on it.

[diver203_98]

When you installed the 30Gig drive, did you check the jumpers to make sure it was set to "slave"? When it was in the other computer it would have been set to "master" so you would have had to reset the jumpers before you installed it into your Gateway and turned it on. That would be one thing that would mess up a system, by finding 2 Operating Systems.

[budbd]

When both were hooked up to the same ribbon, I believe they were both on cable select, never messed with the original hard drive of course, left it alone since I had wanted it as a master anyway.

But of course, I tried the 30 gig hard drive by itself, and tried every jumper setting to format the drive, to even include an act of desparation of removing the jumper altogether.

[glc]

What brands are the 2 hard drives, and are you using a 40 wire or 80 wire IDE cable?

[budbd]

By coincidence, they are both quantum fireball drives. As for ribbon size, not sure, other than there can't be more than 40 pins at the most, standard size eide cable.

But mainly, it seems I will have to re format my regular 6.4 gig hard drive all over again, and I just can't see how that happened. I have looked into the "setup" when I press f1 key, but frankly, I can't see anything in there that needs changed.

[glc]

Go to Maxtor's site and get Powermax - it will diagnose Quantum drives. 80 wire cables are cable select, 40 wire are master/slave. Note that they are both 40 pin, the 80 wire cables have a lot finer rib pattern.

[budbd]

Yeah, I am just guessing they are 40 pin, but I really don't thgink there is room for 80 pins there, it aint that dense.

Anyway, since I can't get it to work, I won't be able to have it diagnosed online of course. It is almost as if bios were changed, but I cannot do any changing of bios in setup, and besides, I have a basic 440 lx board in there.

As for the thirty gig drive, looks like it must be total garbage, as in trash can fodder.

[GaryRouth]

Here's the link to the Maxtor Powermax download - has a nice amount of information: http://www.maxtor.com/portal/site/Ma...&downloadID=22

glc was referring to the wire count when he mentions the 80-wire cable - both the 40 wire and the 80 wire have the same connector = 40 pin. The 30 gig drive is probably an UltraATA-66 or 100, and would prefer an 80-wire cable. The 6 gig drive is probably UltraATA-33, and likely had a 40-wire cable in the Gateway. See if you have an 80-wire cable available, you can connect the 30 gig drive to that on the Secondary IDE controller on the motherboard, (set the jumper to Cable Select & place the drive on the middle -Slave- connector), and use Powermax to test it. Leave the 6 gig on it's original 40-wire (jumpered as "Master") & test it as well. You can put your optical drive as slave on the 40wire cable while you work on things.

To use PowerMax - you'll create a bootable floppy with the download, & boot the computer with that (set the 1st boot device to the floppy drive in the Gateway's bios)
Then follow the menus. [as I mentioned, there are good step-by-step instructions at the Maxtor site]
. . . Gary

[budbd]

Yeah, I ahve no 80 wire cable of course, and too bad my brother junked that whole computer less hard drive and two pc100's, I wish I could have had it for more parts.

My secondary cables are the ones that go to the cd drive, and is of course 40 wire.
By the way, that old windows 2000 compaq didn't even have a windows cd, just a system restore cd, no wonder he wanted to junk that computer, which cost him $800 after a $200 rebate back in then for his daughter.

Oh well, I am sure the drive is working, he just said the files were just too corrupted due to her downloading something, I believe it was a new internet service that just didn't work right and had corrupted the drive files.

NOW FOR MY 6.4 GIG DRIVE, I guess it will have to be reformatted and everything reinstalled, oh well, so swell, haha. Besides, I might want a clean install anyway, since I had an annoying password to type everytime to get into windows.

Also, I couldn't seem to highlight "bios" in the setup. the pointers just own't move down there.
I surely do not want to try this hard drive in my new Dell, cause, haha, getting low on net capable computers right now, but at least have a spare, a AMD 133 100mhz with a manual connection.

[budbd]

Also, I figure, that what you are saying is that if I get an 80 wire cable, I can just use that to hook up the drive as a primary drive, no slave? At this point, if I had the 30 gig drive, that would be enough. But really, at this point, I just wished I had done that instead and not screwed up the programming of the 6.4.

[GaryRouth]

Seems like you might first want to use PowerMax to test each drive. Write-protect the PowerMax floppy just in case the 30gb drive was infected, for it could infect the floppy as well.

Try testing your old Gateway drive first. Just use your original cable, and put the jumpers back the way they were (probably to Master for the 6.4). Leave the other drive alone while testing your original drive [removing it entirely from the system might be best - (unplugged)].

Then, if you want to test the other drive, you can take the original drive out, and try the 30gb drive on that cable. Set the jumper to Master, since you'll be using a 40wire cable. Many drives are backward-compatible with the older cables - they will work, only more slowly (at the slower UltraATA - 33 rate instead of their faster rated speed). Most drive manufacturers recommend using an 80wire cable for the UltraATA 66 and up, though. Just for the test, though, you can try the older cable. The fact that things weren't progressing past 1% doesn't sound promising, but let the diagnostics have a try anyway. As a last resort, if things still don't test well, even with an 80wire cable for the 30gb drive, see if it will zero-write. If it can't: that's about the end of the line for that drive.

If your original drive tests OK with powermax, next try a floppy-based antivirus scan. glc has a few links in some threads here in the Win9x forum to F-Prot (if you search this forum you'll find them). After the drive scans clean, you can try booting from it again. If it won't boot, you can either wipe it and start over, try an over-the-top, or try a recovery disk.

Later on, if the larger drive tests OK with powermax, why not zero-write it and start fresh. Unless you want to try to salvage any useful data on it first: in which case, you'll need to virus-scan it also.
---------
Regarding the Bios Setup: any recent Bios will have the boot options you need. It is Bios Setup that you are entering when you press F1 while the Gateway is starting. You can't use a mouse to enter Bios Setup: you need your keyboard. [arrow keys usually aren't used until you are already in the setup screens].

In the Bios, set the IDE to Auto if possible.

. . . Gary

[budbd]

I figured out I could run scandisk from win 98 cd for the 6.4 gig drive, and I didn't like what happened next. It called for fixing all kinds of file errors, and by the time it got done, I determined it would be just best to reinstall, and the surface scan of the 6.4 gig drive showed it is good. Mainly, it would not reboot anyway after all the files got supposedly "fixed", and was seemingly real screwed up.
REally peeved me off, considering I installed it three times cause when it first comes up, it says something was installed that may need a specific file, "vnetbios.vxd", and this was even after I removed video card and everything else that it normally had.

Oh well, all I have to do is "press any button to continue", and I do to load win 98. Glad this is my extra machine, cause I wish I could just throw it out onto the concrete patio and bash it to pieces.

Also, still couldn't get the 30 gig to format, but can use fdisk of course to partition it or remove partition. Funny, the drive seemed to work in the compaq computer, but just had numerous errors from all the garbage it had gone through all the years(needing the usual "fresh" reinstall of an operating system).

I still can't believe the ignorance of all this that just by hooking up the 6.4 gig as a master, the 30 gig as a slave on the same cable last week, that it screwed up the 6.4 gig programming so bad I had to go through all this. Strange how I installed windows 98 several months ago perfectly on this machine where now it is not a perfect install, wanting something with a "vxd" extension. In fact, I installed another copy of win 98 of mine on a my AMD p133 machine.

This GAteway is exactly everything is has always been, a piece of garbage, with a garbage 440 lx board, and too bad I got stupid/bored and bought a $44 new pci video card, and upgraded the celeron to a PII cpu for $7 total, and put in $40 worth of ram(for entertainment/boredom reasons). The total Gateway computers garbage, six years of problems that never end, hope my new Dell will hold up.

[budbd]

Also, I will be taking apart the 30 gig hard drive just for fun, cause it has caused me enough work, and surely must be either screwed up or just something I cannot use, cause it aint getting anywhere near my new Dell.