Crazy Hard-Drive Problem....Very confusing to me

[jzodda]

Well today I got a new WD 40GB IDE U100 HD to go with my IBM 45GB 75GXP Drive. I installed the WD Drive without a problem and jumpered it correctly and then loaded up into windows ME. On boot I noticed that the Size and UDMA setting in the bios was correct for all drives. Well Windows ME was still showing the new drive as my removable Spar Q, that I took out of the system for good to fit the new drive into my 4 IDE port limitation.

I then remembered that WD Drives come with an EZ install disk, so instead of using a Windows ME boot and FDISK, I restarted to boot up that. I selected EZ install for the new drive and that went ok till then end when it started saying read error from drive C, abort, retry, fail. I hit retry a few times and then it said my new drive was good to go.

On reboot I got a Disk I/O error after posting now every time. I was like what the hell? Then I went into the bios on reboot and now my IMB primary drive is now being listed as a 33GB Drive! I do not know why. So far I cleared CMOS and I also flashed the bios again but that did not do it.

Any advice?

 

[jzodda]

amazing all the help I got from here (Just kidding)

Well I was in a bit of a panic, and man all the threads I read here and on CUSl2.com forums and at storage review had my head spinning. From problems due to 4 sides of memory (which I have), too compatability probs, and much more I did not know what to try first. I was not going to take the system apart though till I exhausted all software options, so I downloaded and installed the IBM diskmanager and I un-installed the WD EZbios which did something (I dont know what) to my bios. Supposedly it is supposed to enable large disk support on older MBs, but with mine it did the opposite to my IBM drive. Really I am speculating, but my probs did begin after I used WD's drive install program. From now on I'll stick to tried and true FDISK. Anyway, in the IBM Disk manager there is the option to make the MB Bios see HD's larger than 32GBs and after running that I am back to normal and now my system reads everything correctly. If I was a newbie I would have been in deep Sh!t

What this little day also taught me is that I have not been keeping up with my backup CD/RWs of important apps and docs. Thats what I am going to do now because you just never know. If my HD was not so full I would Ghost an image but I do not want to use 20CDRs for the image.