PC not detecting 2nd drive

Post #39,220 by lincoln 5/19/02 2:14:11 PM Reply	PC not detecting 2nd drive I have a Pentium running Windows 95 that I "back up" to a separate hard drive every now and then using Powerquest's "DriveCopy". Over the years it has performed as desired. A few weeks ago I went to Austin's Goodwill Computer Store and picked up a used Quantum 1.2 gig hard drive to use (my regular backup drive is being used in my apartment machine). Opened up the case, connected the cables, set the jumpers, booted to a floppy, inserted the DriveCopy floppy, go to run it, and...nothing. Check all connections and jumpers; they're as they should be. Reboot, hit F1 to go to setup. BIOS sees both drives. Set original drive as Master, new one as Slave and reboot again. PC comes up fine, but Windows doesn't see the 2nd drive at all. Try to find it under the Control Panel's "Add New Hardware". Doesn't find it. When the PC boots, a little green LED lights up on the underside of the Quantum drive. Is it possible that the drive is basically dead? I can't return it because they sell things "as is" with no warranties. Other drives that I've bought there before have worked fine. How do I prove that there's something wrong with this Quantum drive? If the drive is dead, can I use a new drive, like say a 10 gig unit by Maxtor, as the backup unit? I don't care about Win95 not seeing the 8 gig beyond the 2 gig limit for the C:\\ drive partition; I just want to safely copy everything to another hard drive and know that I can use the drive in the future if necessary. lincoln "Four score and seven years ago, I had a better sig"
Post #39,221 by Andrew Grygus 5/19/02 3:48:19 PM Reply	First things first Run fdisk. Preferably, boot from a Win95 (DOS 7.x) floppy with fdisk on it. Preferabley, set the drive as master and no other drives attached. Fdisk will tell you if you actually have a working drive and you can view the current partition table. Even if the drive is fine, if there is no valid DOS partition found, or no logical drive in an extended partition, Windows won't see the drive. If fdisk sees the drive, delete any non-DOS partitions and create a DOS partition. It's best to delete any existing partitions and remake them anyway, because different motherboards can have very different ideas about how to configure the drive. If you have some weird partitions that fdisk won't delete, use the DR-DOS or Linux fdisk. If the partition table is totally screwed (some viruses will do that), you might need to 00 out the first sector with a disk editor. Fdisk will then make a new partition table. [link\|http://www.aaxnet.com\|AAx]
Post #39,405 by orion 5/21/02 1:50:55 PM Reply	Go to Control Panel Select the System icon and double click on it, check the Device Manager Tab, and then open up the Drives folder. See if it lists both hard drives there. If not, then Windows 95 may not be seeing the hard drive. Perhaps you may have to disable 32 bit access, or turn on DOS compatibility mode or something. More possible is that the other drive isn't compatible with the newer drive. Try setting the 1.2G up as a single drive and see if it boots up. Use a floppy disk to boot into Windows 95 Command Line or DOS Command Line mode and see if you can run FDISK and FORMAT on the drive. If you get an error message there, it very well could be the drive is bad. *I am free now, to choose my own destiny.*

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