Trying to make a slave a master

[nmaclean]

I'm trying to make a 3.5G Maxtor EIDE drive themaster/boot drive in my system. It is currently a slave to a 730M Western Digital.

I assumed that if I cabled the Maxtor in place of the WD and set the jumper to master I could reformat and re-install the OS.

The trouble is the BIOS seizes before it even boots from the floppy drive. I can't even get into SETUP.

The drive is partitioned into 2 1.7G partitions.

If I reset the jumpers/cables, everything still works fine.

Am I missing something really basic here???

 

[edfair]

Try the Maxtor diagnostics disk and run the low level tool or fdisk it and remove the partitions before you move it to the new ID.
It sounds like you may have drive overlay software installed.

Ed Fair
Give the wrong symptoms, get the wrong solutions.

 

[nmaclean]

I got the latest version of the MaxBlast software, but didn't see any "low level" tools. It has a menu driven interface that allows you to create partitions according to what OS your running. Didn't see any way to delete partitions, only re-partition.

I ran FDISK and deleted the EXT DOS partition, but couldn't delete the PRI DOS partition because it said the "disk could not be locked".

Now when I boot with the Maxtor drive connected (either as slave or master) the BIOS siezes where I can't run SETUP or boot from floppy.

At this point I've got what I know is a perfectly good 3.5G drive and I can't get to it. How can this be?? What physical/logical characteristics of the drive could I have screwed up to cause the BIOS to not even allow me the opportunity to atone for my sins???? How is where I am different from where I'd be if I took a brand new drive out of the box and cabled it up?

 

[wolluf]

Try this to remove partitions -

http://www.lpacomputers.telinco.co.uk/PD.zip

Or to wipe the disk -

http://www.killdisk.com/features.htm