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Fdisk/Formating drives

F

Fatdog

Golden Member
Hi Everyone,

I have a couple of beginner questions, I've done a search here and a couple other sites looking for Fdisk/formatting info and can't really find the info I need. I'm adding 2 WD ata100 30 gig drives to my Win98se system using a Promise ata100 card, and I have questions on setting them up. According to the Ez-bios manual, becausing I'm using a controller card I should use Fdisk not ez-bios to install the drives. The only info at the WD site is for using the ez-bios. All the other info I found is for Raid setups, which I'm not doing.

My system has 2 hdd's now set as master/slave on the first motherboard controller. My cdrw and dvd are master/slave on the second motherboard controller. I installed the promise card already, and I have a win98 boot disk with the fdisk/format utilities on it.

My qestions are what do I do when I boot the system up from floppy? How do I make sure the drives are seen by the system? If anyone can help, or point me to a site with the info or manuals I would appreciate it.

Thanks, Jim.
 
You can use WD utilities to partition and format the new drives WITHOUT applying EZ-BIOS. It might tell you that you need to based on your system not recognizing the drives or some such CRAP, but it isn't true. I hate EZ-BIOS with a passion. It has caused me problems on several occasions. You hard disks are better off without it. Your controller will definitely work better without EZ-BIOS on the drives.
 
Hi, I really don't want to use the ez-bios either.

When I boot from the floppy and go to fdisk, how do I find the drive to fdisk and format? I can change directory to all my disks already on the system and see the files on them, even the ramdisk is out there. I'm a little on the dense side here I guess, how do I find the new drive to fdisk?

Jim
 
Connect the drive and make sure the bios settings are ok.
You should be able to see it.

Note: I'm not a pro at this and I may be wrong.
 
first make sure the bios is trying to use the promise card to find the boot disk and not the ide1/2 channel on the mobo. I don't use a card but I believe it should be trying to boot from scsi.
 
If you want to make sure you do not fdisk the wrong disk by accident, then physically unplug that disk beforehand.

Old motherboards with old bioses might not be able to recognize the full space of a large drive unless it uses the proprietary disk management software (e.g. EZbios).

If a disk is set up with proprietary disk management software and you want to get rid of it, then fdisk /mbr on that disk. You will lose all the data however. 🙂 Then you can reformat it and start over without the proprietary disk management software on that drive.
 
Thanks for the replys everyone. Using the link bacillus provided and poking around in fdisk, I was able to get everything squared away. All kinds of extra storage space now 🙂
 
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