Need Help: Second hard drive is not recognized

[Salvador]

I'm trying to install a second hard drive on a Windows 98SE system, so I can get access to the files on the drive. I've tried installing it as a slave and as a master. It shows up in the BIOS, but I don't get a drive letter. The drive was originally formatted with FAT32 inside of a USB external enclosure. I couldn't get the drive to work with this pc via USB, so I took the drive out and hooked it up via IDE instead.

I can't figure out what the problem is. The drive is recognized by all my other pc's (FAT 32 and NTFS) while in the external enclosure. Why won't this system recognize the drive?

Could it have something to do with formatting the drive with FAT32 on a Win98SE machine inside of the external enclosure?

Any ideas? This is really racking my brain! Any help would really be appreciated!

BTW..

Mobo is a Abit KT7A with a Duron 750. I'm running Windows 98SE. The secondary drive is a 120 gb WDSE EIDE.

Sal

 

[unprovoked]

This is just a shot in the dark...

... but you might need to check if the HD size is compatible both with your BIOS and OS. For example, according to http://www.abit-usa.com/faq/mb/check80gb.php KT7A will support 80GB drives for BIOS revision WW and newer.

Also, can you clarify: are you trying to format the 120GB WDSE drive from a Win98SE system, or are you trying to read the drive in Win98SE after it was already formatted in another system.

If you are trying to format the drive from Win98SE, you might need to check that you have compatible versions of FDISK.EXE and FORMAT.COM. Check out http://www.hexff.com/w98_hd.php

If this is not the solution, maybe someone else has a better idea?

 

[Fern]

Hi Sal

Could it be a jumper problem? As you prolly know WD HDDs are a bit funny in that regard. No jumper whatsoever if its a master on its own IDE channel etc.

BTW: Although I've got an external/USB HDD, I've never bother to open it. Is it just a regualr EIDE drive in the enclosure? If so, I'm curious what, if any, jumpers are on it, since the whole jumper thing seems irrelevant with the USB connection.

Fern

 

[birdpup]

Check the jumper and ensure it is in the proper position. If it is hooked up as a slave, then ensure the Master drive also has its jumper in the correct position.

 

[montag451]

Just off the direct question for a second -

What files are you trying to get off the drive?
XP can read FAT32 files perfectly well.

So can Win2K

 

[Salvador]

Thanks for the replies everyone. I got it figured out. Not the way I wanted to, but I got the problem fixed.

What happened was I have a work system running Windows 98 and the OS is basically toast. What I did was backed up all of the important files on an external drive. Until I have a chance to reformat the drive with the tweaked OS, I wanted to upload the files that I saved on my external drive to another system, so I can keep working while I do the reformat of the other drive. The problem that I had was that I couldn't get my external hdd to work with this temporary system. It might've been a chip conflict because this temporary system uses the infamous Via chipset.

Anyway.. I gave up on trying to upload the files via USB with my external drive, but I still needed a way to upload the saved files to my temporary system. I tried networking the two pc's, but I couldn't get that to work either. I don't want to get into that... Heh. What I ended up doing was pulling the hard drive out of the external enclosure and tried hooking it up via EIDE. This isn't a store bought external hdd btw. It's a separate enclosure with a regular EIDE hdd. I wouldn't have pulled the hdd out of a external hdd that came that way. The problem here was that with this drive hooked up as an EIDE drive, the system wasn't recognizing it. The BIOS was, but the OS wasn't. I figured that it had to be because the hdd was formatted while in the external hdd enclosure. That's got to be the only explanation.

When I hooked up the hdd via EIDE, I had the jumpers set correctly. I had it set up on its own IDE channel set as Master. I then tried setting the jumper to slave and had it hooked up as slave. Still, no go. The drive was originally formatted with this system using FAT32, so I didn't think that was a problem. I am aware of FAT32 not being able to see a NTFS partition. That's why I formatted the drive with FAT32. So I could use the external hdd with either a Win9x system or a NT based system.

After being fed up with it, I thought about just pulling the hdd that I need to reformat out of my work maching and hooking that up to the temporary system via IDE. It worked perfectly! I was able to get everything transferred over except my address book and favorites. I hadn't saved the exported files on the original hdd and had no way of getting to them with the original drive hooked up as a slave.

Do you ever have one of those days when everything that should be really easy is really difficult? That's what happened to me today. After the external hdd fiasco, I had to get my address book file off of the external hdd. Since I couldn't use this drive with the temporary system, I had to think of plan b. First, I tried using a USB pen drive to transfer the file and couldn't get that working for some reason. Then, I tried burning a CD-R of my address book and kept getting errors when I tried importing the file into my temporary system. I then thought that the only way to do it is to try a FDD. The only problem with this is that I stopped installing FDD in my systems. I have one in the temporary system, but not one in the system that the external drive works with. Doh! I then remembered that I bought a Mad Dog external USB fdd a while back, but never used it. I pulled it out of the package and it worked brilliantly. I copied my address book onto floppy and finally got it installed.

Now.. I have to reformat and reinstall the original hdd. I'm not looking forward to that at all after today. Maybe tomorrow will be a better day for me.

Sorry for the long ramble..

Thanks again!

Sal