Installing a new hard drive, with no OS on it.

[inseriousneedofhelp]

Someone please help! First things first. I have a 40GB Maxtor DiamondMax Plus hard drive, that is brand new, with no OS oni it. For some reason, the Windows 98 discs (cd and floppy) aren't working in the startup, once its hooked up. I had the jumpers in the master position, everything seemed right. On the startup setup screen (where you find BIOS), it seems to recognize the drive but nothing happens on startup. SO, now I've decided to hook the drive up to my pc (P2 Intel 256 RAM), to format the drive and install windows on it, to see if that helps with the install on the other box. I'vr hooked up the drive, I'm not sure if it should be in master or slave position. And what my BIOS settings should be for it. I've hooked it up in master position, and when I booted it up, I wasn't prompted for New Hardware Found. I looked in my Device Manager, and the Secondary IDE was listed as was the Primary, but beside each is (dual fifo). I'm not able to assign drive letter either. I believe my system is reading both drives as one (?). What am I doing wrong, and why is this so difficult. I thought this would be the simpler way. And finally, hopefully someone can help me with this, what;s next? How do I get the OS on the drive properly)? In case I forgot to mention, I'm running Win98 on my system.

Thank you sooooooo very much for any information you can give me.

 

[Nakash]

Hi there,

have you checked following things ?

(All with drive connected Stand alone as master on primary IDE Channel)

- Bios Identifies HDD on primary IDE Master ?

- Boot order in Bios is set to floppy,CDROM,HDD ?

- try to boot with Win98 boot disk (not usually the setup disk) then try to run fdisk and make a partition.
(if you got it such things are much easyer with Partition Magic)

- the hard disk should be a DMA 100 drive. if your board supports this or DMA 66 you have to use a
IDE cable with 80 wires (still 40 pin Connector) dont mix this connection with other IDE devices that not use
same DMA rate.

farewell

Nakash