Can't see Win 98 volume in My Computer

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My Windows 98 system developed a file system difficulty that was not correctable by SCANDISK or Norton's Disk Doctor. As I wanted to "upgrade" to XP, I purchased another disk drive, installed it in the PC, and installed XP on it. XP is working great

What I want to do is see the Windows 98 disk so I can copy all my files off of it and then reformat it as an NTFS volume. The problem is that XP can "see" the drive but cannot give it a drive letter for some reason. In the Device Manager the drive is "functioning normally." In Disk Management it is "Healthy(active)" but I can't seem to make XP give it one or assign one myself. Any ideas on how I can give it a drive letter so it is usable?

I have another system with Windows 98 and a similar scenario that also cannot see the second Windows 98 drive. Maybe your suggestions here will help me with that system as well

Thanks

David
 
Hi,

Your problem is probably a failed drive or a corrupt partition - and if
that's the case it doesn't matter what you use to read it. I would suggest
you start with a drive diagnostic (usually free to download from the drive
manufacturer). If the tests come up ok, and the drive hasn't failed, then
you may have a corrupt partition. Suggest that if this is the case, you find
someone who understands drive structure to recover your data, this is not
something that a home user should be doing.

--
Best of Luck,

Rick Rogers aka "Nutcase" MS-MVP - Win9x
Windows isn't rocket science! That's my other hobby!

Associate Expert - WinXP - Expert Zone
 
Did you jumper the disks appropriately? Set the XP disk jumper to "Master"
and your 98 disk as "Slave".
Pay close attention to the XP disk -- some hard drives have different jumper
settings for "Master, Single Disk", than for "Master".
If your XP disk is jumpered as "Master, Single Disk", during POST it reports
to the BIOS that there is only one hard drive, which your BIOS believes and
duly reports to Windows XP.

Basically Windows says "I see a disk, but the BIOS tells me it aint there so
I don't know what to do with it."

steve


David Fox said:
My Windows 98 system developed a file system difficulty that was not
Click to expand...
correctable by SCANDISK or Norton's Disk Doctor. As I wanted to "upgrade"
to XP, I purchased another disk drive, installed it in the PC, and installed
XP on it. XP is working great.
What I want to do is see the Windows 98 disk so I can copy all my files
Click to expand...
off of it and then reformat it as an NTFS volume. The problem is that XP
can "see" the drive but cannot give it a drive letter for some reason. In
the Device Manager the drive is "functioning normally." In Disk Management
it is "Healthy(active)" but I can't seem to make XP give it one or assign
one myself. Any ideas on how I can give it a drive letter so it is usable?
I have another system with Windows 98 and a similar scenario that also
Click to expand...
cannot see the second Windows 98 drive. Maybe your suggestions here will
help me with that system as well?
 
Hi David,

Was the drive partitioned with an overlay or other software? Or done with
fdisk?

--
Best of Luck,

Rick Rogers aka "Nutcase" MS-MVP - Win9x
Windows isn't rocket science! That's my other hobby!

Associate Expert - WinXP - Expert Zone
 
Rick

The disk is the original as Windows Setup creates it. I imagine it is fdisk or a special utility that is part of the Windows installation

Joust

On the system that I installed XP on, I've got the drives set for Cable Select. The XP drive is the master, the 98SE drive is on the slave connector

In both systems I have the drives connected to a Promise Technologies Ultra100 TX2 controller, not the on-board IDE controller.

Thanks for the response so far. Was on vacation last Wednesday until today so I was unable to respond until now

Regards

David
 
Joust

I just had a chance to follow-up your suggestion. Rather than use cable select, I forced the second hard drive to be the slave drive. I have a ZIP 250 on the same cable that I made the master. I still have the same situation. The drive is seen by device manager but XP is not assigning it a drive letter. I thought that by making it a slave drive that it might now be seen and have a letter assigned. Had been using cable select before

Let me ask a more basic question. I actually have 5 IDE devices that I am trying to connect

CPU Board Secondary IDE - CDRW drive & DVD driv
Promise Technology UltraATA100 Primary Channel - New Western Digital Disk Drive 80g
Promise Technology UltraATA100 Secondary Channel - ZIP 250 (Master) &
Maxtor Disk Drive 40gb (slave

XP sees the Promise drives as "SCSI" devices. I'm not really worried about that. Does XP have a hard limit of 4 IDE devices regardless of how they are connected? I will check with Promise to see if I need to upgrade any firmware or load their driver instead of the XP driver. Any other suggestions

Thanks

David Fox
 
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