Complicated Hard Drive Issue, Help Please!?

[stinkeye]

Ok..just built my new rig with 1.2gig Athlon on EPoX 8kha mobo. Upon that first boot into windows 95, thing went haywire. It would take too long to describe all the ugly details. The end result was, I took my old 3.2 gig hard drive and did a clean windows 98 install. Yes, that's win 98, i was formerly using win 95. That went great and i'm now up and running. At this point my plan was to take my other hard drive (30GB WD) and set it up as a slave to the 3.2GB that contains the operating system. However, when I get to Windows, the original 3.2GB drive is all i can see. Sorry this post is so long but its quite hard to condense about 8 hours of troubleshooting in one paragraph. Any help would be appreciated!!!
All this just so my wife doesnt lose her "The Sims" efforts!

 

[Harv22222]

first off, you just get your 30 gig HD recently? One thing and you may have already done this, but did you format the new hd? And if you are gonna use the new hd as a slave make sure the jumpers are set right on both hd's. When booting up your computer, does your bios screen recognize the hd? If not there is a jumper thats not right. If the bios does recognize it, make sure the new hd is under the fat32 partition. Make sure you don't have an OS on your 3.2 and another OS on the other. Thats a few things, and if you have done these post that you have or PM me if ya want some help.

 

[h0vic]

Actually it does not matter if you have Win98 on the 3.2gig and another OS on your 30gig. As long as the 3.2gig is set as the active or boot drive.

Go into system properties and check your device manager to see if you have any conflicts. Also, check the last tab. I think it's performace (haven't used Win9x in a while). It tells you if Windows has any problems with any drive.

 

[stinkeye]

Thanks for replying. Just some more details, the drive is detected in the BIOS as the slave. I just got done running Western Digitals data lifeguard diagnostics on it and everything is fine there. However, in Win 98, device manager shows two hard drives (with no conflicts BTW) but there is no drive letter assigned to the 30GB drive. Also, the box for inserting drive letter is ghosted out. Thanks again.

 

[Slikkster]

You can have Windows redetect the drives by going to the following key in the registry (Regedit):

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Enum\ESDI


Find the entries for 2 hard drives and delete them. Exit Windows and reboot. If there are other, older hard disk entries that don't apply any longer, delete them as well.

See what you get upon reboot.

If no go there, make sure you have no limitation on drive letters in your config.sys file. Additionally, I'd add the following entry in config.sys without the quotation marks:

"lastdrive=z"

 

[stinkeye]

It's fixed. Simply had to reinstall the Western Digital EZ-Bios program.
Thanks to all who responded. I really appreciate it. Now I just have to find out how to get my IE bookmarks back. Thanks again.