IBM hdd, FDisk, I'm dumb

[SWScorch]

So I get my new 60GB IBM hdd today. But here's the thing: I cant get it set up right! Its an ATA100 60GXP, and I'm installing it on an A7V mobo. After I do FDisk and set it up, it wont recognize either the C drive (the primary partition) or the entire thing!! I just thought I got it working, installed Windows 98 on it, and as soon as it restarts, it says "DISK BOOT FAILURE. INSERT SYSTEM DISK"

In case you're wondering, I'm going into FDisk, creating a primary partition, then creating an extended partition (20 and 40 GB respectively), then creating logical drive in extended partition, then rebooting. All this is done after booting with a Win98 SE boot disk. What am I doing wrong??????? I'm going crazy because I've done this dozens of times before and it has always worked!!!

 

[sohcrates]

well, fdisking is only step 1. step 2 is formatting. have you done that?

 

[LoneWolf1]

After you FDISK you still have to format the drive/partitions before you can use them.

 

[SWScorch]

Yup, I have formatted. Usually after I restart after doing FDisk, I can only see the extended partition, aka, the part I want to be Drive D is seen as Drive C, and drive D is nonexistant. I did get it to work right once, and then when I restarted after that nothing worked.

 

[tontod]

Do the drives show up in the bios?

 

[SWScorch]

Well see, the BIOS doesn't officially support ATA100; its a KT133 (no A); so there is a seperate Promise chip with its own BIOS on the board, and that loads up after it POSTs, so in the BIOS it doesn't think it has a hdd installed since the A7V BIOS doesn't read the ATA100 connectors. However, I do have the ATA100 BIOS set to Auto, and it finds it upon loading, so.... I dunno... I'm stumped here...

 

[SWScorch]

your post got me thinking tho... I searched around in the BIOS some more and set the ATA100 drive to be first on the boot priority. Will see if that makes a diff.

 

[PHATJACK]

So you installed Win98, everything went fine, then when you rebooted after installing it said disk boot failure? Try conmnecting it to the main IDE so see if can get detected. It is possible, but not very likely, that the drive is dead. See if you can get it to be detected

 

[SWScorch]

Well, it will now boot, although it still gives me the "disk boot failure" error; I just enter and it boots. Maybe a BIOS update is in order here??

 

[tontod]

Did you make the partition active? You can do that in fdisk. You cant boot into win98 without the drive's partition being set active, I believe. Dont know if that would solve your problem or if you've already done it, but its another thing to try out.

 

[SWScorch]

yeah I set it active.

Just so you know, Win98SE is successfully installed and I am installing drivers right now. So as of this moment the only problem is the "Disk Boot Failure" error, which simply requires that I hit enter.

And, I now have another question: I also have a 30GB ATA66 drive that I want to use as sotrage for my mp3s. If I hook it up as a slave on the ATA100 connector, will it slow the 60GB down? Should I put it on its own ATA66 connector or what?

 

[tontod]

There wont be much of a slowdown. No drives out there utilize the full bandwidth of the ATA100.