win 98 boot disk trouble

[squirrel-steam]

Im using a windows 98 boot disk i downloaded and made to format the hd on my dsi and other things, but it is being unreasonable. The hard drive is very clearly marked as C: in the bios, but when you type Format C:, it just says "invalid drive specification", so i try C, C:\ C:\>, all of those, and it still is being unreasonable. I try fdisk to make a primary dos partition, and it check the hard drive and everything, tells me to restart, so i do, then it says there is no partitions.

Im starting to loose my temper with this.

[carlsson]

Perhaps the hard disk is damaged to the point BIOS detects it correctly but it won't work to read or write to?

[billdeg]

try a disk diagnostic utility. The FAT aint PHAT.

[MikeS]

Nothing worse than a loose temper; sounds like you're the unreasonable one, not the disk.

You don't format a hard disk, you format a partition; until you create partitions there is no drive C, D or whatever to format.

If you have indeed FDISK'd correctly and made the primary partition active, there are no other partitions to interfere and it is the first drive in the IDE chain, but drive C does not appear after you reboot (although you won't be able to use it until it's formatted), then you indeed have a problem, although a hardware problem with the disk would probably give you an error of some kind.

Review the FDISK & FORMAT procedure & make sure you're doing it right. Note that there were problems with the W98 format program and MS has an upgrade, although that should not be relevant to your problem.

m

[carlsson]

By the way, in the other thread you mentioned a 25 MHz 386DX with 2 MB RAM called DSI. Is this the same machine? Does it have built-in IDE or on a controller card? Perhaps in that case some driver is required for the Windows 98 installation disk to properly access the hard drive. If this is the case, I doubt 2 MB will get you anywhere with Windows 98, more likely 8-16 MB is required?

[squirrel-steam]

Yes, that is the DSI, but i use 98 boot disks because they have the best utilities,

I used the hard disk utilities in the AMI bios on the hard drive, you can hear it happily chugging along and see the hd light blink with it, I ran a media analysis, and it did come up with a list of bad sectors (perhaps why the win98 computer it was on stopped working?), and i marked them, and i formatted in the bios, but i don't know that it does anything except erase everything on it.

It does use a ISA card to control the floppy/IDE/parallel/serial ports, but whats strange is in FDISK, i go to make a partition, and if i say Yes to make it the largest available and make it active, it dosen't make a partition, but if i say No and manually set up the size and make it not active, then it shows up on the C drive, (says the max size is 504mb? the hd is 1038???) so i set it up as that, makes a partition, and then i set it active. Then it asks me to restart to make the changes. So i do that, then the partitions suddenly disappear!

I think maybe the hd is bad? Well, i can't go back to the old one, it is opened up and i took the magnet out, and it was bad too.

[carlsson]

Aha, you're only using the Win98 boot disk to get into DOS, not that you're trying to install Windows onto it. :idea:

[MikeS]

Sounds like maybe your HD is too large for that BIOS; some of the old BIOSs didn't deal with that very well. Check the manufacturer's site for recommendations; there may be a size limit jumper to get you going. Try manually FDISKing to less than 504MB; failing that, get a disk manager for that make of disk.

I'm assuming that the MB s too old to have a flashable BIOS.

m

[squirrel-steam]

The board and case is dated at 1990, while the AMI bios posts at 1992.

[MikeS]

Also make sure it's the only drive on that IDE port; even when properly jumpered, some old drives did not play well with each other, especially when one of them is large.

m

[modem7]

Per MikeS, "Sounds like maybe your HD is too large for that BIOS; some of the old BIOSs didn't deal with that very well"

504MB BIOS limitation:

See http://www.dewassoc.com/kbase/hard_drives/hard_drive_size_barriers.htm
See "FAT16" portion of http://www.mcmcse.com/comptia/aplus/notes/filesystems.shtml