Please Help Me!

[RuNok]

I am trying to setup a system. A Abit KT&-Raid with Thunderbird 900@900. I have a Maxtor Diamondmax 60 drive that I'm trying to fdisk and format. I have messed up bad. the point at which I'm at now is when I boot up with win98 boot disk, I hit shift & f5 to go to a: prompt then fdisk, I answer yes to enable fat32.
This is where I fudged up I look at the current fixed disk drives and it shows me
Disk Drv Mbytes Free Usage
1 96 96 %
2 58620 58620 %

I have used to format this drive the Maxblast partitioning and formating software but would like to use just plain old windows fdisk and format but if I do, upon loading windows setup.exe it gets to a point and say unable to install windows 98 on this machine.

How do I get back to just one drive in fdisk? Nothing I do lets me go back to one drive in fdisk.

 

[Techwhore]

You're a little unclear. If you're using a windows 98 SE boot disk, you shouldn't need to shift+f5. It just runs through the disk and returns you to an a:. From there you can fdisk successfully. What you need to do is delete the partition you created with the maxblast software. I assume that's the drive with 58 percent. Is this your only hard drive? If not, have you already successfully installed and run windows 98 on the other? If it's more than one drive, are you planning to use RAID? Please post back and be more specific and I will try to further assist you

 

[BT7990]

One option might be to do a low level format, then try and run fdisk again. Look on http://www.maxtor.com/SoftwareDownload/utilities.html for a low level format utility.

 

[RuNok]

I have run the maxdiag.exe software from maxtor and it say upon checking for the drive to perform tests on that drive is damaged and gives a error code E03. Does anybody know what that means. I have taken another maxtor 60gb drive and put it in as well and it says the same thing it can't be the drives.

 

[RuNok]

Also its a 98 boot disk.

 

[RuNok]

Could it be possible that I used a bad disk that had the Antiexe virus on it in this new system. And thats whats giving me a drive 1 with 96bytes on it. In microsofts fdisk it shows 2 drives,Drive 1 with 96 kb ; The other is Drive 2 with 58620 mb. Nothing in fdisk will remove these two drives. I want to go back to 1 drive only with the entire disk on C:\ after I comlete fdisk and format. This way when I install win 9x or whatever it will be the only drive and the only partion.

 

[RuNok]

This sytem has only one HDD in it . It is on the highpoint raid (ide4). All other componants are on ide's 1 & 2. I am not looking to install raid just a HDD on ata66/100 connector.

 

[Techwhore]

Have you tried using the drive on the other IDE connections? maybe it's a bad IDE BUS master. Try fdisk /mbr followed by a re-partition and low level format. That sequence should fix any problems on the drive, in theory.