ez-bios and hard drives

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Guest

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Archived from groups: comp.sys.ibm.pc.hardware.storage (More info?)

hello, folks =)

i have a somewhat complicated situation which someone perhaps can help me
with :)

in the near future i will be purchasing a new computer. i currently have an
older model computer which is serving the purpose fine for me, but soon will
(hopefully) be a backup computer.

i have two hard drives on my system: a 13GB and a 2GB. The 13GB is the
master C: and the 2GB is the slave D:. my bios is fairly old, so it has an
8GB limitation on it (i contacted the manufacturer of my bios to see if they
have an upgrade and if it addresses larger disk drives). anyway, i installed
ez-bios (from western digital) and it allowed full access to both drives
with no problem. :)

here's my issue: recently, my floppy drive went kaplooey (i tried a new
drive, new connection, etc., with no luck, so i assume it's a bad controller
on the motherboard). at some point i'd like to repartition my drives and
reinstall windows 98 on it once it is my secondary computer. however ... the
floppy drive does not work, which is causing issues.

i really don't use the floppy for anything but would need it to boot up and
run diagnostics and/or start from scratch. so, i'm trying to figure out a
way to be able to get away without using my floppy at all and boot from the
cd drive (if necessary).

even though my bios is old, it does allow booting from a cd. however, since
my master hard drive uses ez-bios, booting from the cd drive does not work
(for grins, i tried booting through ez-bios with a cd in the drive to see if
it might think the cd drive was A:, but it didn't work, lol).

my question(s) is this: is there some way to start from scratch on my system
without having access to the floppy drive?

what i thought might work in theory is switching the 2GB as the master and
the 13GB as the slave. that way, ez-bios would not be needed to recognize my
master, and this would allow the cd drive to be bootable, no? in other
words, there would be no need to see the slave drive while booting, so since
the master drive would not need ez-bios, i could boot directly off the cd.

is any of this possible, and if so, how would i do it?

to sum things up, i want to be able to reformat and set up my computer
without using the floppy drive and having ez-bios set up for the large drive
(moved to the slave).

thank you!
scott :)
 
G

Guest

Guest
Archived from groups: comp.sys.ibm.pc.hardware.storage (More info?)

Hello. I have had similar situations in the past. The easiest thing to
do was to copy the contents of the CD to the slave drive, boot to
windows, exit into dos, and then run the install from the slave.

IMF
 
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Guest

Guest
Archived from groups: comp.sys.ibm.pc.hardware.storage (More info?)

Howdy! Thanks for writing :)

"Irwin" <ebct@hotmail.com> wrote in message
news:1104456021.342371.261880@c13g2000cwb.googlegroups.com...
> Hello. I have had similar situations in the past. The easiest thing to
> do was to copy the contents of the CD to the slave drive, boot to
> windows, exit into dos, and then run the install from the slave.

Thanks :) Do you mean copying the Windows CAB files to my D: drive? I guess
I wasn't sure what CD you were referring to.

:)
 
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Guest

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Archived from groups: comp.sys.ibm.pc.hardware.storage (More info?)

Copy the entire windows 98 CD to the drive. Then exit to dos and run
setup.exe from the copied files.
 
G

Guest

Guest
Archived from groups: comp.sys.ibm.pc.hardware.storage (More info?)

Back when I built my first home-built system in 1998, I had a WD 2.5gig
drive from the old system I want to hang on to that had EZ-Bios installed.
I was forced to use Western Digitals software to write zeroes on the drive
to eradicate the EZ Bios overlay using the WD floppy. Windows in my new
system drive wouldn't recognize the old drive until the overlay was wiped
off (Win98 had no capacity limit low enough to give problems accessing that
small a drive). I don't know if it would be possible for someone without a
floppy drive to make a bootable CD/R with Western Digital's DOS Life-Guard
Tools on it to be able to wipe the old drive.
Herb

"Irwin" <ebct@hotmail.com> wrote in message
news:1104551359.753887.4870@z14g2000cwz.googlegroups.com...
> Copy the entire windows 98 CD to the drive. Then exit to dos and run
> setup.exe from the copied files.
>
 
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Archived from groups: comp.sys.ibm.pc.hardware.storage (More info?)

"Cyborg-haf" <cyborg_haf@hotmail.com> wrote in message
news:hJ-dnWFZAtMXl0rcRVn-jw@giganews.com...
> Back when I built my first home-built system in 1998, I had a WD 2.5gig
> drive from the old system I want to hang on to that had EZ-Bios installed.
> I was forced to use Western Digitals software to write zeroes on the drive
> to eradicate the EZ Bios overlay using the WD floppy. Windows in my new
> system drive wouldn't recognize the old drive until the overlay was wiped
> off (Win98 had no capacity limit low enough to give problems accessing
> that small a drive). I don't know if it would be possible for someone
> without a floppy drive to make a bootable CD/R with Western Digital's DOS
> Life-Guard Tools on it to be able to wipe the old drive.
> Herb
>
> "Irwin" <ebct@hotmail.com> wrote in message
> news:1104551359.753887.4870@z14g2000cwz.googlegroups.com...
>> Copy the entire windows 98 CD to the drive. Then exit to dos and run
>> setup.exe from the copied files.


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