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Slave Hard Drive Problems

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hoss13

Technical User
Oct 3, 2001
3
GB
I have two identical Western Digital drives set up as slaves. Both are set up identical,(jumper settings etc). The machine is running Windows 98. When i remove one of the slaves and replace it with the other, BIOS recognises it but Windows does not. Control panel/system/device manager says that the primary IDE controller is not setup correctly. I have tried removing it and rebooting to no avail. Any ideas why windows wont recognise the identical drive.
 
If they're not already, try getting the drives partitioned and formatted (say FAT16), and then try connecting 'em up...

ROGER - GØAOZ.
 
Unfortunately i cant format them. Both drives have quite a few gigs of data that i cant afford to lose. Any other suggestions.

Thanks.

Rob
 
How about fdisk. It should be able to see them both as identical when they are installed. You might also install them as the only drive and use fdisk to see what it can report if it can't run with them as slaves.
It may be that the filesystem has hidden/system files added on one and not the other.
Probably would work this at the DOS level at the start, then go to 98. 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.

 
Are you assuming that there's still data in place on the drive Windows can't "see"? Or can you verify it on another machine? Under what operating system did this drive get it's data written? If, for example, it was NT4, then W98 won't read it.

ROGER - GØAOZ.
 
No, all the data has been verified on another machine and was written using windows 98.
 
I'd try Ed's suggestion re FDISK before you do anything further...

Did you use the AUTODETECT facility in the BIOS to detect each disk in turn when you changed over? Or did you assume that the second one (which W98 can't read) would be exactly the same? They may be identical makes/models, but are they both using identical disk parameters? They could have initially been partitioned and formatted using different numbers of cylinders, heads, sectors, etc.

Also, try invoking the W98 boot menu and see if you can get into this drive at the DOS level.

ROGER - GØAOZ.
 
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