[RESOLVED] second hard drive in win98

[rolladar]

I have a second hard drive installed that I formatted in FAT32 when I had windows2000 installed on my primary. I reformatted my primary hard drive to put Win98 back on but my secondary is not recognized in Windows 98. How do I make Win98 see it?

[Eagle PC Diagnostech]

Did you set it up in cmos, for auto

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An obstacle is something you see when you take your eyes off your goal.

[StevePorter]

Boot to DOS. Load FDISK. Does the second drive (Device 1) show as having a DOS partition? If not, does it show as having a non-DOS partition (if FDISK is from Win98SE, it'll show the partition as being NTFS)? You may have to delete the partition and reinstall a new one...

[3fingersalute]

I don't know if this is true or not, but another tech who works here had a 40GB drive he stores his MP3's, documents, etc. on and he found that if he partitions it FAT32 with WIN2K, then later moves it to a WIN98 system, they will not see it. If he partitions it FAT32 with WIN98, both WIN98 and WIN2K will see it.

So for whatever reason, WIN2K's FAT32 does not seem to be backwards compatible. He tried this with 2 different WIN2K boxes to make sure it just wasn't his machine!

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I have no recollection of any set of words, that when grouped together, form a favorite saying!

[Brian G]

I looked in fdisk and it only showed my c: drive. My secondary is not listed at all. It is detected fine in the bios and worked fine in Windows 2000 just one day ago. Is my old version of Win98 blind or is there some mysterious way of making it see my drive? My device manager shows a second hard disk but give it no drive letter.

[Brian G]

Problem solved. I discovered that although I formatted the second drive in fat32 under windows 2000, it was still a non dos drive, thus not able to be read by windows 98. So I was able to see it in option 5 in fdisk and everything is fine. Had to delete the non dos partition and make a new dos partition.