MSDOS/W98/Hard Drive help please!!!

[BOAC]

Perhaps just HELP!! I need all the help from the 'historical' ('hysterical?) gurus out there, please.

A longish story, with my now using my laptop 'cos the desktop is 't-u'.

Had Linux on third (E) hard drive, partitioned accordingly, as an experiment. Gave up after Xmas and tried to departition said drive, which resulted in an unformattable drive. Got round that with Seagate install prog., then after a bit of 'ok action', W98 started freaking out and rebooting/freezing etc. Tried re-install (C drive) but same again. Today I tried removing newish extra memory card and reinstall W98, and it will not!

I can access the drives in W3.1 and am right now copying the C drive as a back-up (yes, I hadn't backed-up recently!).

Symptoms are:

During intitial boot into MSDOS by floppy, I get a MSDOS message
"Standard Mode:Fault outside of MS-DOS extender" with a stack dump.

Cannot locate that error mx anywhere.

Despite this, I can run W98 install from CDRom using the floppy to boot, but when it gets to the first 'restart' it gives me a GP error message. Somewhere along the day I had a 'Fat32' warning and others. Has anyone ANY ideas?

My next go will be to try and install W98 on another drive as it might be a problem with the FAT32 table on the C drive?

NOT a good start to 2003!

[Background Noise]

Don't you have to run fdisk first? I think you have to set/unset all the partitions first then format (having booted from floppy).

[ORAC]

It's probably formatted in FAT16 for which WIN98 has a 2Gb max partition limit.

Boot from a floppy and use FDISK. Delete all the present partitions and create a new partition. When asked if you want to use all the disk space answer yes. It should then format it in FAT32.

Then reboot and FORMAT and then load WIN98. It should work OK after that.

[BOAC]

Thanks y'all for the replies

A couple of questions
- How can I tell if the disk is Fat16? The C:drive is 3GB.
- I did Fdisk the E: drive and try to format it, but Windows would NOT format it 'bad sectors' or similar, I think it said.

I have tried dropping the Sec IDE cable off, leaving just a C:drive and CD rom, but W98 still willnot install, saying on first rebbot that it needs a bootable disk.

Strangely enough, the MSDOS mx has 'disappeared', and now I am getting an incorrect size display during boot for the D (15 Gb and the E(40GB). Both showing as 100+GB! C drive shows as ok.

I'm beginning to wonder if the CMOS battery is at fault? The board is only just over 1 year old, though.

[Agent86]

As a victim of a few attempts with Linux I have found that the easiest way to return a hard drive to working condition is using aefdisk a replacement for the msdos fdisk. This will kill any errant non dos boot partitions that linux has a habit of leaving around that can't be removed with fdisk. Be careful though, the killall option does just that

When you say you used the seagate installer to fix the problem what did it do? I am guessing in that it added a "dos extender" boot file to try and access the non dos partitions. This started the ball down the slippery slope

Let me know how you get on.

MAx

[BOAC]

Agent 86 - I have no idea what it did, but for a few brief glorious hours it returned my 3 drives and W98 to life!

Last night I actually managed to limp through to a W98 'Safe' mode, but every attempt to reboot further has ended in failure.

I had also an MDSOS warning 'Secondary IDE no 80 pin cable installed', which was odd since it had been fine. I have replaced that cable with a new ATA cable and now get a Windows GPF warning! Still cannot reinstall W98.

[BOAC]

With a flash of genius (desperation?) I noticed this am that my M/board (EPOX 8KTA3) had a pair of UIDE connectors as well as 2 IDE conns), to which I gradually transferred the drives, and MIRACLE I am back running again on the desktop.

Thanks to all who have, as usual, helped me here, and a final Q for you all, since the problem may stem from a fault in the 2 IDEs, is there a way I can check the serviceability of these?

[Background Noise]

How many hard drives have you got (actual physical HDDs not partitions)?

I think on that mboard, the Ultra IDEs are ATA100 capable so you need to use those to gain the advantage of high speed drives, using 80 pin cables. The 'std' IDEs can be used for eg CD ROMs/CD RW etc. Will your CD ROM work on the secondary/std IDE channel(s)?

[BOAC]

BN: 3 - my original 3.?GB (C:/boot) Prim Master
- CDROM Prim Slave
- add on 15.? (D Sec master
- further 40.?GB (E SEc slave

I've been in contact with EPROX UK (board manutactures) and they have suggested the same - trying drives in different IDEs.

I think I'm, going mad here, as with the C: and CDROM back on the 'IDE' conns, it all works at the moment! Still running Secs off UIDE though.

Could it be that the registry just got completely confused or is it possible for BIOS to get corrupted? I had installed a further 256 DIMM on top of the 2x128s plus a hardware 56k modem, just after removing the LINUX partition (on E - and proving a 'sat' boot and run W98 - when this all went wrong. The message about the '80 pin cable' came up only after all the mucking around - before it seemed perfectly happy to run as was.

[ORAC]

I think it most likely that it's a dodgy pin on the cable, they tend to be the most common point of failure when things are disturbed. If the problems re-occur get a couple of new ATA 100 (80 pin) cables and, hopefully, the problems will go away.

[BOAC]

SHHH! Whisper who dares! I think ORAC may be close to it, as I have put 2 new cables in and it is STILL running.........!

Much appreciate all the help.