Partition problem in windows 98

[Varun]

Hey all.

I have a 15GB drive in my old PC. It's partitioned with a 6GB Fat 32 drive, and the rest broke up into Linux partitions for dual boot. The PC is as follows.

AMD K6-2 500
Aopen AX59 Pro Via MVP3 Chipset BIOS 2.36 Aug 7/2002
15GB Drive (master1)
20GB Maxtor 7200RPM drive (just put in) (slave1)
Windows 98, all updates
VIA 4 in 1 4.45

The PC has been working great for months. I bought a new drive for my main PC, to replace my Maxtor that has gotten quite loud with bearing whine. I have my Maxtor split into a 5GB Primary partition, and 15GB of Logical on an Extended Partition. It has worked great on my other PC for years.

I put the 20GB in my old PC, and booted up. When I boot I get an error that Drive E has errors, Scan disk will be run etc. It won't run though, and boots into Windows.

The BIOS reports both hard drives properly, 15GB UDMA LBA, and 20GB UDMA LBA. I have tried manually setting the drives, as well as Auto.

When I open Explorer, I have a C drive, D Drive, E Drive, and F drive. The E drive is a 0 byte unformatted drive. It is the Extended partition... but the Extended partition is completely used by the logical partition in it.

Has anyone ever seen this, or have any ideas how I can fix it without Fdisk and format? I don't want to lose the data I have on the drive.

Thanks for any responses.

One more thing- Partition Magic reads everything correctly, the E drive is the logical drive, and there is no F drive.

 

[Harvey]

In Win 98, when you have more than one physical drive, the first partion of the first drive is always C: . The first partion of the second drive is recognized as D:.

When you add a new physical drive to a system that already has multiple partions on the first physical drive, the drive letters for all subsequent partions on the first physical drive are pushed down one. That is, your old drive D: became E:, etc.

Ond good approach would be to unplug your original drive, and use a bootable floppy with FORMAT.COM and FDISK.EXE on it to set up the drive the way you want it. When you add the new drive to your system, you will then have to deal with which drive you want to use for specific information. If you want everything to work the way it did, before, you may then have to copy information from one drive/partition to another to keep things in the order you had them.

Hope that answers your questions.

 

[Varun]

Thanks for the response. My question is a bit difficult to explain really.

The first Hard drive (primary master) has one 1 Fat 32 partition on it of 6GB. The other 9GB is formatted in ext2 for Slackware Linux. Windows can not see these partitions, and there was only ever a C drive.

I added a hard drive with 2 Fat 32 partitions, but Windows sees 3 partitions and gives an error. It does not do this in my other computer.

On the second hard drive there is:
Primary partition-5GB
Extended partition with a 15GB Logical drive.

Anyone ever seen this? I can't find anything about it...

I don't want to format the drive, because it has about 15GB of data on it.