Stupid Hard Drive Install Question

[bobdobolina]

I am trying to help a buddy of mine install his new (second) hard drive into his Win98 System and am having some strange toubles. He simply is attempting to add this second drive to his system for space so I figured it would be a breeze. Problem is, I can't sit in front of his system to do it (he's too far away) and I haven't used 98 for so long that I must be missing something in the process.

Here's the problem: The drive installs fine and is recognised by the BIOS as his secondary master. He also has a primary master HD and a secondary slave CD-Rom which are also recognised. When he gets to Windows, he can't see the new drive in "My Computer." However, it shows up in his device manager. It was originally showing as not working properly, so he uninstalled and rebooted. It then showed as working but couldn't be assigned a drive letter (all the options were greyed out). He eventually got the drive working as Removable, but of the 80gigs on the drive, it only shows 7.

I'm certainly not an inexperienced computer user and have built and repaired dozens of systems, but have never encountered this problem. If somone might have the time to give me some troubleshooting ideas or an install walkthrough link for 98, it would be very much appreciated.

Thanks,
bOb

 

[Knightlife]

Um...kinda weird.
Was Win98 still using a config.sys? Make sure that there's no lastdrive=D or something in it that limits the assignment of drive letters.
Also, make sure the cylinder limitation jumper on the drive is not installed - that can cause weird errors.

 

[bobdobolina]

I'm not sure about his config.sys. I'll ask him though. A far as the cylinder limt jumper, I am only aware that he has the appropriate master slave settings jumped. Once again, I'll ask. Such a strange occurance though. If windows couldn't see it at all, I would know where to start. Since it is in the device manager and functioning properly, yet not assigned a drive letter or otherwise available, I'm lost.

Thanks for the tips...

 

[redbeard1]

Is his bios set to auto detect the hard drive? Also, fdisk in win98 has a glitch that it doesn't report the size right. So an 80 gig would probably show up as less than 16 gig (64 + 16 = 80, minus formatting sectors.

There is an update from microsoft here.

update

 

[bobdobolina]

His bios is set to auto detect the drive. As far as he's told me, it is seen as the correct size upon bootup. I'll pass along the FDisk fix to him and see how that goes. Any ideas why windoze can't make the drive work unless he sets it to removeable?

Thanks

 

[redbeard1]

What are his system specs. More specifically the motherboard make and model.