INSTALLING 2nd DRIVE IN XP MACH. 2nd DRIVE HAS WIN98 ALREADY ON IT...

[gesellman]

I have the following dillema....
Ok, first of all, I'll explain the situation.
I bought a used computer that had the following problem...
It locked up shortly after loading windows xp... and there was nothing he could do, he said... so being the cheap skate that I am, I offered him $75 to get rid of his headache... he took it
also there was a password at the welcome screen and the guy didnt remember it, and didnt have the xp disk to even reinstall windows....
I took it home and tried it out...first, I tried the "control+alt+delete" twice on the welcome screen, put "administrator" on the user name, and no password, and voila', I got into it... second after repeated attempts to enter windows through safe mode, step by step, scan disking it, BIOS setup changes, and all those things, it kept locking up...
So I decided to look inside the tower... I found 2 hard disks connected... when I unplugged the ribbon plug off one of them, xp loaded perfect, and hasn't locked up since...
and also the other hard drive has win98 with every paid software you can imagine on it...
What i found interesting is that they installed xp, on a 4 Gb drive, and win98 on a 20 Gb drive... why, I don't know.
Ok, my question goes as follows...
I want to use the 20 Gb drive as a slave... since I dont have the xp disk, I cannot put xp on the 20 Gb disk and so on... how can I fdisk, and format the 2nd drive without compromising the xp drive? and how should I configure them in bios?
My computer has the following features:
Windows xp on drive 1, 4Gb capacity
windows98 on drive 2, 20 Gb capacity
1Ghz amd processor
512 sdram
Do not know make and model, it looks like a self buitl pc.
If you are reading this last line, I thank you for taking the time to read all of this, and thank you in anticipation of all your input...
Robert Zak

 

[dogone9112]

set secound hdd as master drive fdisk ,, format in normal way reset hdd to slave when done.

 

[wolluf]

Robert - bit confused. You said XP locks up when second drive is connected - did I miss something? If you have second drive connected, XP won't work? As you know what's on second drive, do I take it you've booted machine from it into 98?

Can only suggest checking jumpers are correctly set for both drives, cables ok and properly seated, bios set to auto detect both drives, try second drive as master on second IDE channel.

 

[gesellman]

Ok...yeah, I must've jumped a line or two... What I meant is that when I unplugged the 2nd drive (win98) the xp drive booted up correctly, and ran just fine, when I plug the 2nd drive (win98) and unplug the xp drive, it boots into win98 without a problem...they just do not work when both plugged, as follows:
Both plugged: Computer boots the xp drive, goes to the welcome screen, and soon after it locks up, and there's nothing you can do to make it work, all functions cease, no keyboard, no mouse, I have to unplug and plug the machine to restart...
So my question is... if I unplug the xp drive, make it boot from the 98 drive and fdisk and format, what next?
set as slave? how about the bios setup? how do i set it up there? autodetect? and will formatting the other drive, change anything in the mother board, to where it'll mess with the xp drive later?... thx.....

 

[Dreamland]

gesellman - the fact that the second drive has a bootable 98 system on it is probably irrelevant to your problem.

It sounds like either both drives may be configured (via jumpers on the drives themselves) as 'Master', or both drives are jumpered as 'Cable Select' (CS). You want the XP drive jumpered as 'Master' and the 98 drive jumpered as 'Slave'. The jumper configuration is most likely *not* the same - it varies by drive manufacturer and model. If they're not printed on the drive, go to the manufacturer's site and check your model.

*After* the jumpers are set correctly, go into your BIOS settings and force an autodetect to see if both drives are recognized correctly. You probably shouldn't need to set the drives manually if the cable is good and the drives are working correctly.

 

[gesellman]

Ok, it worked.....now I have both drives working, the xp as master and the win98 as slave...
I'll just use it like that, instead of trying to format and get myself in trouble....
thx