SQLwannabe
Programmer
I was getting all kinds of weird Windows errors so I decided to just wipe the thing clean and start over. It was my children's computer and they had put junk on top of junk and I thought it best to just start from scratch.
I ran Fdisk and erased the current partition and then set a new one and made sure it was active. I rebooted and then formatted the drive.
I then booted my computer with my Win ME bootdisk and I noticed that it loaded the drivers into Virtual Drive D: instead of C: I thought something was wrong, but I proceeded to run setup from my CD Rom drive to install Win ME. It got somewhat through the process of copying the files and then would crap out and say it couldn't copy certain files. After rebooting a few times and a few more unsuccessful attempts at installing windows it finally dawned on me that I needed to look further into what the problem might be.
I rebooted and went into my bios and noticed that my hard drive was not being detected. It is set on Auto-Detect (or at least it appears to be) so that eliminated the most common cause of the problem.
My hard drive is an IBM Deskstar 30 GB running on an Asus A7V motherboard with the latest bios with an AMD 1200 CPU. I downloaded an utility from IBM to test the hard drive and it found the drive and all tests were successful. This means the hard drive is fine as far as I can tell. I wasn't seeing any bad sectors when doing routine maintenance with Scandisk before all of this.
Someting I'm noticing is that on booting it seems to set up the Primary/Slave settings and then looks for a hard drive. After I see the terms Primary Master etc. I see at the top what looks like a message from Promise Technology which is the ATA controller saying something about the Bus Master being enabled and then I see the word "Detecting" below and then it does show my hard Drive below this. But as I've said in the bios it doesn't show up and if I look at the boot sequence and cursor down to IDE hard drive it says "None".
When I run the IBM utility which is bootable it will give me the drives that it detects and it shows the following:
00 Primary Master Plextor CD Rom Drive
01 Secondary Master Creative CD Rom Drive
02 PC IDE 0 Master My IBM Hard drive
As far as the physical setup I'm sure it's fine since it has worked with no problems for several months. By physical set up I mean cables, jumpers, etc.
This is a regular Ata controller and not Raid. I only Ran Fdisk after repeatedly running into this problem and thinking that maybe it might help.
Any thoughts or suggestions would be appreciated.
Walter
I ran Fdisk and erased the current partition and then set a new one and made sure it was active. I rebooted and then formatted the drive.
I then booted my computer with my Win ME bootdisk and I noticed that it loaded the drivers into Virtual Drive D: instead of C: I thought something was wrong, but I proceeded to run setup from my CD Rom drive to install Win ME. It got somewhat through the process of copying the files and then would crap out and say it couldn't copy certain files. After rebooting a few times and a few more unsuccessful attempts at installing windows it finally dawned on me that I needed to look further into what the problem might be.
I rebooted and went into my bios and noticed that my hard drive was not being detected. It is set on Auto-Detect (or at least it appears to be) so that eliminated the most common cause of the problem.
My hard drive is an IBM Deskstar 30 GB running on an Asus A7V motherboard with the latest bios with an AMD 1200 CPU. I downloaded an utility from IBM to test the hard drive and it found the drive and all tests were successful. This means the hard drive is fine as far as I can tell. I wasn't seeing any bad sectors when doing routine maintenance with Scandisk before all of this.
Someting I'm noticing is that on booting it seems to set up the Primary/Slave settings and then looks for a hard drive. After I see the terms Primary Master etc. I see at the top what looks like a message from Promise Technology which is the ATA controller saying something about the Bus Master being enabled and then I see the word "Detecting" below and then it does show my hard Drive below this. But as I've said in the bios it doesn't show up and if I look at the boot sequence and cursor down to IDE hard drive it says "None".
When I run the IBM utility which is bootable it will give me the drives that it detects and it shows the following:
00 Primary Master Plextor CD Rom Drive
01 Secondary Master Creative CD Rom Drive
02 PC IDE 0 Master My IBM Hard drive
As far as the physical setup I'm sure it's fine since it has worked with no problems for several months. By physical set up I mean cables, jumpers, etc.
This is a regular Ata controller and not Raid. I only Ran Fdisk after repeatedly running into this problem and thinking that maybe it might help.
Any thoughts or suggestions would be appreciated.
Walter
