2nd HD not recognized by Win98SE

[Orangeman]

Hi Everyone,

I was running diagnostics on my Maxtor91020D6 HD. This is a secondary. I was trying to eliminate a bad sector. I was using Powermax V2.5 diagnostic utility from Maxtor. After I successfully ran all the tests and restarted my machine I got an error message telling me that it could not open D drive (my secondary) because of some device attached. The I made sure it was properly installed. Powmax also said D was properly installed. They have a diagnostic for this.

Then I made sure all my cables were securely fastened and correctly installed. When I restarted my computer my D Drive was missing entirely.

It is recognized in the BIOS just not in the OS.

What do I do?

Win98Se, K7SEM M0bo,Onboard Sound(AC'97) &Video (AGP4X); IE6; Netscape 6.2, WIN98SE, 2-HD's 1st 12G. 2nd 10G.Epson C60; Visioneer Scanner, Aiptek Videocam; 17" Monitor, Iomega 100, 20X CDROM; 56K, AOL 8.0; MS Word 2000; Command AV., & over 40 Games

Thanks,
orangeman

[NooNoo]

Boot to dos with a diskette - see if the drive is there in dos first of all.

If it isn't sounds like it is not partitioned.

If it is, there is something screwed in windows.

[Garak]

Agreeing with NooNoo,

But if Orangeman was checking for bad sectors, then I would suspect there was a partition on the drive, if anything was corrected / written to the drive during diagnostics, then it maybe the cause of the problems you are having now.

But as NooNoo has said, boot to dos first and check to see if you can access the drive from there.

[Orangeman]

Thanks NooNoo & Garak,

While I was waiting I went into the Powermax Diagnostic Utility from Maxtor Website. I wasn't getting the D drive from the boot disk before when I originally posted this post, but when I went back into Powermax and reformatted the D drive and exited PROPERLY, (pressing F3 instead of CNTL ALT DEL), some sound came from my Floppy drive and my D drive was restored on reboot.

Sorry to bother you,

Thanks again,
Orangeman

[Orangeman]

Hi Gang,

Something interesting happened. After I got my D drive or 2nd HD back. I ran scandisk and reformat. This is because I could not open my D drive until I did.

After I did that and rebooted my D drive dissappeared AGAIN!

I have contacted Maxtor Technical support regarding this issue but it may be three days before I am able to get an answer and use this drive - assuming they answer my question.

Anyway to answer NooNoo's question. When I reboot using a startup disk I do get a D Drive. I can NOT format it or run scandisk. I get an error message "missing parameter"

I input FORMAT D:

When I boot with a boot disk and click,'Boot without CDROM support' I get a message saying "Diagnostic Tools are being loaded into Drive D. Microsoft Virtual RAMDRIVE Version 3.06. "

Evidently my 2nd HD has become a virtual RAMDRIVE. (V.3.06).

How do I change this?

THanks,
Orangeman

[shamus]

Switch the jumpers so that it's your primary drive and nuke it (fdisk,format,etc...) From my experiences, once you have a bad sector on a drive it's worse than any virus you may encounter. You can still use the drive, but I wouldn't advise keeping anything important on it.

[Orangeman]

Thanks Shamus,

According to the system utility I ran, Powermax - by Maxtor the manufacturer, I no longer have any bad sectors. It said this just before my drive dissappeared on me.

Orangeman

[Ruslan]

Originally posted by Orangeman
According to the system utility I ran, Powermax - by Maxtor the manufacturer, I no longer have any bad sectors. It said this just before my drive dissappeared on me.

Your harddrive disappered because Powermax utility has sucsessfully remapped those bad sectors (i.e. swapped with good sectors from drive's reserve zone - it calls "remapping"). Thus, MBR is also changed... After that you should do fdisking and reformatting of the drive.

By the way, every harddrive,(even brand new!) has bad sectors, but those bad sectors were remapped by manufacturer using similar utility... and only special utils can see, how many bad sectors that particular drive was having...

[Orangeman]

HI Ruslan,

I went over to the Microsoft Knowlege Base and figured out the rest for myself.

Thanks for the assist,

Orangeman

[shamus]

Ruslan is correct, (he is the HDD guru here after all, IMHO…..) bad sectors are inherent to a HDD during manufacturing. I just meant that if your HDD starts developing them I wouldn't be confident with its reliability. I have drives that I've been able to successfully move the bad sectors and they have worked for a while...but in the end they end up being toast. Probably just my bad luck, but worth being aware of the possibility.

[Orangeman]

Actually I think you're right Shamus,

I fdisked, formatted, and scandisked. No bad sectors. It is recognized as Fat32 with no errors. Yet when I try to copy and paste from one HD to another it takes forever. Before this happened it took only a few seconds.

Also my computer freezes up so badly I have to restart.I think you're right about this being as bad as a virus.

Perhaps I fdisked wrong. I will go over it again tomorrow. However perhaps it is just the drive giving out.

Thanks again for your advice,
Orangeman