Anyone care to have a stab at making sense of the following?
Am making up a 'bitsa' to run basic Dos 6.2, W95/98 and Linux. The case is an old desktop AT and I have a choice of :-
2 Mobos - 486 EISA only 20Mbs RAM or EISA/PCI mix 48 Mbs RAM with a Cyrix 166 Pentium equivalent. Both boards boot up to pre-OS OK. (memory checks and BIOS recognises the specified non-SCSI H/D)
5 H/Ds - 3 SCSI (5Gb, 1Gb and 85 Mb) and 2 IDE (both Quantum 85 Mbs)
The preferred Mobo has built-in F/D and IDE control slots and a serial port for the mouse. The other (486) needs I/O card(s). Although both boards booted OK initially, both reported 'no mouse detected'.
SCSI H/D control is from either a Western Digital or Adaptec add-on card. (both work OK and provide host and device configuration menus)
Initially I set up the preferred board (EISA/PCI mix) with the SCSI 5Gb H/D. Everything booted OK but FDISK was only reporting 2.3 Gbs. I recalled having used Partition Magic to re-partition the drive, so booted from their rescue disk and found a 2.2 Gb 'hidden' partition. "Unhid" it (ugh!)and was back to 5 Gbs. FDISK-ed it to two partitions and installed System Commander to provide dual booting. When I installed Win 95 the installation changed the H/D set-up to THREE partitions. Didn't like this, so tried to FDISK back to two partitions, deleting the W95 partition. End result? - two partitions but only 4Gbs available. No amount of FDISK-ing would change this, so tried a further W95 install. Successful and worked for a couple of boot-ups then refused to recognise the drive. FDISK similarly failed to see the drive. Using both the W. Dig and the Adaptec host cards 'saw' the drive and (initially) allowed me to verify it with a surface scan (seeing the full 5Gbs). I tried a further FDISK but no joy, so went back to the SCSI menu and attempted a low level format. This started initially on both cards but each time halted with an error message. Tried the other two SCSI H/Ds and although one worked for a short period, it eventually failed also.
The two IDE H/Ds were both tried but produce 'Hard Disk(s) failed' messages on boot-up.
Soooooo... I have lost the plot and have no idea what to try next. If anybody stayed awake through this saga and has any suggestions as to cause(s) or remedy(ies) please feel free to advise.......
I have a club hammer in the tool-box !!
