old P166MMX, has 2 hard drives. However, I can only start the system if BOTH drives are connected. Cant boot off of 1

[THELAIR]

Weird...

Its an AST Advantage 9042 Pentium 166 MMX, 64 MB RAm etc.

here is the IDE layout:


PRIMARY:

-Master: 10GB WD IDE Drive
-Slave: 2GB IBM IDE Drive (orginally came with the system)

SECONDARY:

-Master: 16x CD-Rom Drive
-Slave: None


What's odd is if i remove the 2 GB drive completly, ie: IDE cable disconnect and power cable disconnect, and just leave the IBM 10 giger in there, she wont boot up. I go into the bios to see if it will auto detect it, but it doesnt. If you leave it to "auto configure on boot", and reboot, it wont detect the drive.

the same happens if i try it with the 2gb drive. Really odd. Tried multiple IDE cables and bios tweaks, but being a computer with no compay (AST went Ch 11) you cant flash the bios.

I havnt tried getting it to work with the 2 gB drive being master and the 10 being slave, i should give that a wirl and see what happens

 

[tchybrid]

that happened to my old p166 too. well i got rid of it so there's no problem. but yeah. weird.

 

[THELAIR]

finally figured it out... i switched it so that the 2gb would be master, and it wouldnt work, so then i tried looking for the master/slave dip swithces on the old 2 giger, and it has a very odd setup... but i figured it out and now have it running as primary master.

now my new prob is that the boot disk i made was from win95 B (fat32 supported windows 95) When i try to create a new large fat32 partition on the 10 gig WD drive, it wont, it will only let me create up to a max of 504 megabytes.

Could it be a bios issue? I cant flash the bios thats the only prob

i tried usin ga newer version of Fdisk, but when i use it, it just says incorrect DOS ver

grrr

 

[Barnaby W. Füi]

heh....i've forgot to switch the jumpers on my drives before.....booted up to "no disk found" or whatever....almost pooped my pants till i realized what happened :Q

good luck