Second HD -- Windows 3.1

[Housie]

Hey,

Recently I stuffed up my BIOS on my XP machine, although I saved a backup on
the C: drive. I've dragged out my archaic Windows 3.1 system, and am hoping
to connect my 40GB NTFS drive into it, copy over my BIOS back up to floppy
[using a program such as NTFS File System Driver for DOS/Windows], reconnect
the 40GB drive back into my XP system, put the floppy in and hope for the
best!

Well that's the game plan, however, whenever I connect the 40GB drive as a
slave on the 3.1 system, the computer fails to boot. Is the BIOS too old to
even recognise the new HD? Or is it something else?

Thanks in advance to anyone who can help,

Housie
http://www.users.bigpond.com/no1crush/

 

[Rod Speed]

Recently I stuffed up my BIOS on my XP machine, although
I saved a backup on the C: drive. I've dragged out my archaic
Windows 3.1 system, and am hoping to connect my 40GB
NTFS drive into it, copy over my BIOS back up to floppy
[using a program such as NTFS File System Driver for
DOS/Windows], reconnect the 40GB drive back into my
XP system, put the floppy in and hope for the best!

Well that's the game plan, however, whenever I
connect the 40GB drive as a slave on the 3.1 system,
the computer fails to boot. Is the BIOS too old to
even recognise the new HD? Or is it something else?

Likely its bios has the Award bug that sees it
lock up at boot time with drives over 32GB.

You might be able to do what you want by setting that
drive entry to NONE in the bios drive table and having
Win find the drive with its own scan for drives.

BUT you do realise that Win 3.1 cant read an NTFS
formatted drive dont you ? Thats not a completely
insurmountable problem since there are drivers
around that can mount NTFS formatted drives, but the
combination of the two problems might get messy.

The simplest approach would be to find another
system which doesnt have that 32GB problem.