98 doesn't detect drive

Invisible

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Sep 10, 2002
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Hello All,

Need some urgent help here.

Just reformat a friend's computer with window 98 SE, when I tried to put a physical second Hard drive, 98 doesn't assign a drive letter to it. When I looked at the bios, device manager, they indicated that there is a second physical drive, yet I don't know how to make 98 recognizes it, someone suggests that I have to use fdisk, but I am not very familiar with it. Can you all help?

Thanks so much
 

cojer

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create a win98 boot disk by going to control panel, add remove hardware, startup disk.

reboot the computer and enter cmos setup. set system to boot from floppy (A:) 1st.

insert the boot disk you just created and restart the system. when you get to command promt, type 'fdisk'.

use this to create a new partition on the drive. make sure you set active drive to the new drive before or you'll be messing with your C: drive.

restart the compter (leaving disk in) and get back to command promt. Assuming the C: drive is one single partition, the new drive will be D: at the cmd promt type format d:

remove the disk, restart the computer, and you should be fine.
 

Invisible

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Thanks for the info.

I actually know about that I have to format the drive (it is a 40 GB by the way). However, this 40 GB hard drive already has things in it (all sort of files that I previously backed up). Is it possible to work around the formatting process and still have 98 recognize the disk?

Thanks again.
 

Crashman

Polypheme
Former Staff
LOL, I don't know why you keep giving people this same bad advice, but the guy obviously HAS a 98SE CD, which IS bootable, fdisk is located in the root directory and format in the Win98 directory. You NEVER need the floppy when you have the CD.

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sjonnie

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Is it NTFS formated? Win98 can't recognize NTFS. You could run something like norton commander from DOS and transfer the data.

<A HREF="http://www.anandtech.com/myanandtech.html?member=114979" target="_new">My PCs</A> :cool: