[RESOLVED] Windows 98 and Western Digital

The other day I installed a Western Digital 20.0GB 5400RPM Hard Disk into a Windows 98 based PC. Fdisk the hard disk (went ok), formatted it (went ok) and then booted into windows. Once in Drives C and D were both displayed as hard disk and E as Cd-Rom. If I tried to write anything to D blue screen of death would appear, yet C was fine. Dropped back into to Dos and could write to D fine.

Strange you may think. After a lot of playing about with the master slave settings and swapping IDE channels I ran Fdisk again. The new WD drive was spot on but the C drive was showing as a non dos partition. Thinkin oh crap hard disk has gone down I restored pc to orignal state. The hard disk was still non dos but was fully functional in Win98.

Would like to hear views about whether this non dos partition could stop windows from seeing the new drive.

Sounds like you made the new WD the C: drive and moved the old drive to D: (just double checking) and the old drive is the "non-dos partition" right? If I've got this straight, the old drive appears to have been prepared/installed with an overlay program that no longer works because it's not being loaded at boot up (needs to be in the boot sector). There are several ways to fix this but I would reverse the two drives so the old one is the boot drive again, copy anything important off the old to the new and then reverse them back to the new being 'C' and repartition and format the old drive. This would be the cleanest way to go.

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Ya never know, ya know?

BACKUP ALL INFORMATION BEFORE CONTINUING!

It also sounds like the Non DOS partition appearing could be because you are using an old version of fdisk that does not recognise win98. Try removing all partitions on the new drive, setting it to pri-slave or sec-master and rebooting the machine. Go into windows 98, ms-dos prompt and run fdisk. fdisk the new wdc drive using fat-32 (answer Y to the initial question when fdisk opens) and after creating the partition, restart. Return to win98 and select the new drive (opening it should return a device not ready error, or a read error, as it has not been formatted.) Right click on the NEW DRIVE ONLY and select format. Restart the machine and test it again.

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Death is lighter than a feather - duty heavier than a mountian.

Instead of using fdisk, you should download the DataLifequard software from Western Digital. You put this software on a floppy disk and boot up from it. Then run the EZ-Install option and it formats and partitions your hard drive, without having to use fdisk.


http://www.westerndigital.com/service/diagnostics.html