Reinstalling 60GB slave drive in w98

[millert]

I have a western digital 60 eide hard drive that i have used as data backup on my win 98 system. recently my master drive containing the os failed, and i had to reformat the master drive and reinstall windows. i did all of this with the 60GB drive unattached. When I was done reinstalling windows and the hardware drivers i plugged the 60 GB drive in as a slave expecting it to simply work.

The bios does see it, the setting are incorrect, but it sees it. The install notes for the drive say to set the drive up with 1023 cyl, 16 heads, 62 sectors and it will show up as 528mb. This is now the case, but when windows starts up it does not see the slave drive. i have the tools to install the drive fresh, but that wipes the drive. I have lots of data on this drive i want to keep.

I've tried hoking it up to another win98 system and the same thing happens. if i go to a dos window and type fdisk /status it shows the c: drive okay witht the drive letter, it also shows the slave drive as 528mb but with no letter. it seems as though win98 is the problem, but i'm not sure how to get it to recognize the drive.

 

[micker377]

In BIOS, do you have "auto" select for both drives? How old is the computer and drive in question? Did you try changing the "block" size? (normal - large - and I forget what the last one is) If the block size is set wrong, everything will seem to be OK, but the OS can't read it.

 

[millert]

I had both drives set to "user," Auto did not detect the master (smaller drive with os) properly so i had to set the cylinders, heads and sectors. The WD 60GB drive had always been set to "user" as the install notes say so I had the drive set up the following way.

Cyln =1023, Heads =16, WPcom =0, Sectors =63
LBA Mode =Off, Blk Mode =On, PIO Mode =4, 32Bit Mode =On

Size then shows up as 528Mb

When I go into "Auto detect HD" it detects the master drive but then locks up and does not detect the slave (60GB) or both CD drives.

If I set the slave drive to auto in the advanced bios setup and restart, the computer boots back up bios sees two hard drives and windows loads and only sees the c: drive.

I have not tried changing anthing else, i'm not sure what to set the rest of the parameters to. Blk Mode has "On" and "Off". Haven't tried off.

 

[micker377]

Try both block modes. The system will just try to read it and won't hurt anything.

 

[oisnds]

Did you have Maxblast or some other drive software (supplied by the drive manufacturer) installed prior to the rebuild? This type of software allows using larger, non-supported drives on older systems. When installed it creates a boot record on your primary drive that patches the large drive problem. By reinstalling your smaller primary drive the boot record would have been replaced by the default and the full space on the second drive would not be available.