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Can't get second hard drive recognized

S

sjgmoney

Senior member
Trying to clean up an spyware-infected Win98 computer, can't even get the computer to boot up normally (boots in safe mode, but then locks up after a while) so I figured I'd try taking the hard drive out and making it the slave drive on another Win98 box and clean it that way.

Computer boots up but no second hard drive is visible. Pretty confident I have the jumpers set correctly on the slave drive etc.. It shows up under device manager but not in My Computer. "Adding new hardware" doesn't detect it. Am I missing a step somewhere?

Any ideas on why I can't see the second (infected) drive?
 
I'll double check it but I'm pretty sure I already did and it was. As I mentioned it does show up in device manager. I did a little searching and came across something about Disc Management, where do I find that?
 
Right click on My Computer-->Select Manage (I'm a little rusty on Win98..this is how you get to it in Win2k/XP for sure).
 
Give me a few minutes, and I'll go check out a Win98 box.

There is no Disk Manager, per se. I believe what you can do is access the drive through Device Manager and do what you need to do there.
 
Thanks, I'm all ears!!! I checked again and it does show up in the bios as well as device manager. When I check out the properties>settings in device manager there is no drive letter assigned, it's actually grayed out but there is a check mark next to DMA (whatever that is)
 
Update: I took the drive out and made it the slave on another box I have, this one running XP. New hardware was recognized, was able to access the Disk Management, said the disk was fine but it wouldn't let me assign a drive letter. When I right clicked on it, the assign drive letter part was grayed out. Getting frustrated, any ideas?
 
Thanks for the continued help Ronin. If I initialize/format will I lose the info on there? How do I do so, right click etc? I don't remember if that was a choice when I right-clicked, but I did see assign drive letter but it was grayed out.
 
Well, I was hoping to salvage what is on it. Barring that my last resort will be to wipe it clean and reinstall Win98. (actually not even sure how to do that, I've never done it)
 
put it back in the other 98 box. check device manager. look at the hard disk controller properties settings tab. make sure both channels are enabled.

 
I think that you have a bad (infected) Master Boot Record on the drive. Try FDISK /mbr it will only rewrite the mbr. I have had similar situations, if the MBR is somehow altered WIN 98 will not load the 32-bit drivers.
 
Initialization of the drive won't format the drive, only formatting will. There's no reason why it shouldn't recognize (the option *could* be to import foreign disk).
 
Just a follow up, mainly to provide some closure for all that tried to help. (I appreciate everyone's help by the way) Nothing worked short of totally reformatting the disk so I ended up doing that. Figured I spent enough time trying to fix my friends copmuter so start fresh.

I'll try again with another drive with my XP box to see if I'm able to assign a drive letter. This was very strange.

Thanks again.
 
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