How do I format a second HDD 2

[Tomtanium]

Hi Everyone

My home PC has 2 HDD's (C: and D. My friend was having major problems with his only HDD and was unable to even format it and start over.

I suggested that I took it and put it into my PC as a Primary Slave and then format it and reload with Win98. I changed the jumper settings and booted, no problem, POST beep and there on the screen is the new primary slave. The trouble is that once Windows has loaded, drive D: is the CDRW, there is no E: drive. If I go into DOS the same applies.

Now I believe it might have something to do with the fact that the new HDD is in NTFS format and contains a corrupted version of Win2000.

How do I format it? Any ideas?

Cheers
Tom

 

[WheeDoggy]

Hi Tom,

You said that the HDD is detected by the BIOS and I think that even though the other HDD is NTFS, it should still be detected by DOS/Windoze as a non-partitioned, non-formatted, HDD.

What happens if you don't auto-detect in the BIOS? I have heard where if you select 'None' in the bios that Windows will sometimes detect it.

I may be showing ignorance here as I have not encountered this, and it may sound like a longshot, but it can't hurt.

Let me know.

Regards

 

[Tomtanium]

Hi Whee Doggy

I've just tried your suggestion of selecting NONE in BIOS. On boot it just ignored it, so it didn't work.

One thing I did notice is that when it is detected in BIOS, I see the name FUJITSU and then some serial numbers followed by a gap and a capital E on the end. I've not seen that before. Strangely the HDD that was in the PC before was also a FUJITSU. The difference being that the original is 4G and this new one 20G. I wouldn't have thought that should matter though.

Cheers
Tom

 

[WheeDoggy]

Hi Tom,

I am puzzled about this issue and did a search and there seems to be defective fujutsu models out there.
I wonder if this could be the case.

Have a look:

http://christianparty.net/fujitsu.htm

http://www.zienex.com/

Regards

 

[Tomtanium]

Thanks for that. I noticed that the drive I have is listed there as being one of the faulty batch.

I have however cheated just a bit, I booted with the original 2nd HDD and whilst the PC was on, disconnected the 2nd HDD and plugged in the new 2nd HDD and did a format. The only problem was that Windoze remembered it as 4Gb so only formatted 4Gb instead of 20Gb.

Even in DOS with the spoof HDD in, it was being treated as 4Gb. There must be some DOS commands I can use to overcome this problem.

I might try making it Primary master and boot from a startup disk to see if I can get it's real size documented.

Any DOS wizards out there?

 

[beerhunter2]

I might try making it Primary master and boot from a startup disk to see if I can get it's real size documented

Good idea. Then run Fdisk from the Win98 boot disk. Remove all partitions. Create 1 partition of Max size. Reformat.

 

[WheeDoggy]

Give it a shot.

I am just concerned however regarding the troubles your friend had and the fact that that model is on the list of defective drives.

Wish you luck.

Regards

 

[Tomtanium]

Well! I tried making the dodgy HDD primary master and booting from a Win98 startup disk. No way Jose, just kept saying invalid system disk, replace it and hit any key. I then decided to change BIOS boot sequence and boot from CDROM - success!!

Win98 CD tells me that the partition is bad, not right for Windows and it will now correct it. So it reformatted and loaded Win98 - excellent!!

Just had a look at My Computer properties for C: drive and the 20Gb has shrunk to 4Gb - aaaagggghhhh!

How do I get back to 20Gb? Any ideas?

Cheers
Tom

 

[Tomtanium]

Should have said also that I went into real DOS and ran Fdisk. That tells me the the disk is 20Gb and 100% used as a logical DOS partition. So it looks like a Windoze problem.

Cheers
Tom

 

[Tomtanium]

Problem solved. Ran fdisk and reformatted again. This time Windoze found all 20 of the little gigs.

Thanx people.

Cheers
Tom