Hard Drive letter assignment not available after upgrade

[Guest_imported]

Hi,
I've read through previous posts and seen this question before; but, I've haven't seen an answer. Here's my problem. I had a desktop system that had Win98 installed on it. This system consisted of 2 hard drives, a 2 gig (C (master) and a 20 gig (D(slave). It also contained an Iomega zip drive(B, cd-rom (E and floppy (A. Now that we have the prerequisites out of the way, on to the problem.

This system was working fine - in other words I could see all of the drives from explorer - except for a problem with the display adapter which I determined to be an OS problem. In order to correct the adapter problem I decided to upgrade the OS to Win98 SE (since it was handy). That fixed the adapter problem; but, after the upgrade, I could no longer see the 20 gig HD. I see it in the bios and I see it in Win98 SE (it says the device is working properly) but I can't assign a drive letter and it doesn't appear in explorer.

I temporarily set the Zip Drive to F: just to make sure that I wasn't running into a lastdrive problem (from a previous post) and it worked fine.

Like other posts, I have used the maxtor disk that came with the drive to verify that there were no problems and all tests read/write etc. passed, so I don't believe there is a problem with the drive itself.

One more thing, I'm 1500 miles away from this box and have limited support on the other end so I staying away from drastic measures for the time being. Im also trying not to lose the data on the "missing" drive since it was originally operational. At this point I can't see where a format of the missing drive, as has been indicated in previous posts, makes sense since it was working under Win98 previous to this problem. But given the fact that I'm the one asking for help, I expect I ought to listen rather than argue about suggested corrections.

 

[edfair]

Disk manager that is used to allow the big hard drives to work in earlier OSs puts a overlay program in place to bugger the drive parameters. Without this overlay the drive can't be seen. Solution on the earlier OS was to boot from the DM disk and tell it to install the overlay. Don't know if this will still work from SE but you might have your local support try it on an emergency boot disk to see if it will bring it back at the DOS level before you have them do it for real.
Remote support from that far away is the pits, isn't it?
Ed Fair
efair@atlnet.com

Any advice I give is my best judgement based on my interpretation of the facts you supply.

Help increase my knowledge by providing some feedback, good or bad, on any advice I have given.

 

[txtxcowboy]

DO NOT USE OVERLAY SOFTWARE WITH 98SE!!!!!!!!!!!

There is no need to and you are creating serious overhead you dont need. I know you checked to see if you were running into a lastdrive issue, but have you added lastdrive=z to you config.sys just to make sure this is not the issue? Moving your zip was a great idea... those darn zip drives cause a lot of problems with windows (work quite well in win2K though). try the line in your config.sys even though you shouldn't need it in win98se. If this does not work, I would try disconnecting the cd-rom temporarily and see if the 20gig pops in, my guess is it will.. in this case, make the 20gig the master on the second IDE port and slave the cdrom to it.

peace,

Dave

 

[Guest_imported]

Well, no joy to date. I had the remote support write the lastdrive=z to the config.sys file and reboot, but that didn't solve the problem. I also had them remove both the CD-Rom and the Zip Drive ribbon and power cables. The result of that was the predictable disappearence of the associated drives; however, the second hard drive failed to reappear.