Gah! Help!

[thatdarncat]

I'm having problems with my computer. A little background:

I've got a Dell Dimension P3. The motherboard has an intel 815 chipset. I'm running with 5 drives:

PCI Adaptec SCSI card: 8GB Quantum
IDE1: 20GB and 120GB Maxtors (Master/Slave)
IDE2: CDRW and DVD (Master/Slave)

I've been getting a clicking noise as well as occasional hangs from (I think) my SCSI drive, however it came back clean from the SCSImax diagnostic.

Since I've aquired a new full tower case, I decided to switch over. I stripped down the old case and started installing components in the new case. Initially I only installed the SCSI drive and the CDRW drive so I could install XP.

Booting from a windows 98SE boot disk, I can detect the SCSI drive in FDisk, partition and format it. Booting from a Windows XP cd OR a Windows 98SE cd, I get an error message that reads:

"Invalid boot disk.
Please insert a new boot disk into a:"

I've removed the SCSI drive and tried my 20GB IDE drive. The bios detects the drive fine, but Fdisk does not detect the drive. I get the same error message when I boot from CD.

I'm going to steal Seri's second hard drive back and try that drive. I'm reluctant to try anything with my 120GB drive as that has all my backups on it.

Any suggestions?

 

[gariig]

Sounds like you aren't bookting from a CD-ROM. You need to enable that in your BIOS(and make it the first thing that boots, too).

Gariig

 

[thatdarncat]

Sounds like you aren't bookting from a CD-ROM. You need to enable that in your BIOS(and make it the first thing that boots, too).

Gariig

First thing I did, believe me.

 

[Nareau]

First thing I did, believe me.

Without knowing everything else you've done, I can't really suggest much. Given your description, here's what I would do:
1) Verify that the CD's you're trying to boot from are good. If you've got another working machine handy, try to boot from the CD on that machine.
2) Assuming the disc is bootable and good, disconnect all of your drives. Connect the 20GB drive to IDE1, and set the jumpers to single/master. Connect the CDRW to IDE2 and set it to single/master.
3) Tell the BIOS to autodetect all drives on boot. If necessary (and possible), tell the BIOS to display all messages on boot. Verify that both drives are being properly detected on boot. Look at the CDRW when the machine is booting...see if the disc is spinning up at all.
4) Throw away that old SCSI drive. Seriously...drives are cheap, and unless there's a darn good reason to have those extra 8GB, I wouldn't even mess with it.
5) For the love of all that's holy, don't put Win98 on your computer. If you can afford it, I'd strongly recommend Windows 2000. XP would be second to that. But there's a good chance that 98 is going to have more problems with such large drives (that might be why FDisk doesn't see it).

Spider

 

[thatdarncat]

4) Throw away that old SCSI drive. Seriously...drives are cheap, and unless there's a darn good reason to have those extra 8GB, I wouldn't even mess with it.
5) For the love of all that's holy, don't put Win98 on your computer. If you can afford it, I'd strongly recommend Windows 2000. XP would be second to that. But there's a good chance that 98 is going to have more problems with such large drives (that might be why FDisk doesn't see it).

one to three have been done. Sorry, if I put everything I've done so far down, I'd be here for a while typing

4) Well, it's a 10,000RPM drive, (twice as fast as either of my IDE drive) I was using it for operating system and some games. All other programs get stuck on the 20gb drive, with files (mp3s, pdfs etc) on the 120gb drive.

5) No plans to, believe me. I switched to 2000pro as soon as was possible, then upgraded to xp pro after using it for a few months at school. I find the biggest advantage to xp is the fast user switching. Saves me from having to log out and shut down all my programs if Seri needs to do something on my computer.

That said, FDisk has no problems detecting 20GB hard drives. It's detected my 120GB drive before.

 

[thatdarncat]

4) Throw away that old SCSI drive. Seriously...drives are cheap, and unless there's a darn good reason to have those extra 8GB, I wouldn't even mess with it.
5) For the love of all that's holy, don't put Win98 on your computer. If you can afford it, I'd strongly recommend Windows 2000. XP would be second to that. But there's a good chance that 98 is going to have more problems with such large drives (that might be why FDisk doesn't see it).

one to three have been done. Sorry, if I put everything I've done so far down, I'd be here for a while typing

4) Well, it's a 10,000RPM drive, (twice as fast as either of my IDE drive) I was using it for operating system and some games. All other programs get stuck on the 20gb drive, with files (mp3s, pdfs etc) on the 120gb drive.

5) No plans to, believe me. I switched to 2000pro as soon as was possible, then upgraded to xp pro after using it for a few months at school. I find the biggest advantage to xp is the fast user switching. Saves me from having to log out and shut down all my programs if Seri needs to do something on my computer.

That said, FDisk has no problems detecting 20GB hard drives. It's detected my 120GB drive before.

 

[RyanL]

Perhaps try using the BIOS to autodetect the drive paramters, then set said parameters manually, making sure the drive is in LBA mode. Win98 fdisk may not be able to see it otherwise. That's all I got.

-Ryan

 

[thatdarncat]

4) Throw away that old SCSI drive. Seriously...drives are cheap, and unless there's a darn good reason to have those extra 8GB, I wouldn't even mess with it.
5) For the love of all that's holy, don't put Win98 on your computer. If you can afford it, I'd strongly recommend Windows 2000. XP would be second to that. But there's a good chance that 98 is going to have more problems with such large drives (that might be why FDisk doesn't see it).

one to three have been done. Sorry, if I put everything I've done so far down, I'd be here for a while typing

4) Well, it's a 10,000RPM drive, (twice as fast as either of my IDE drive) I was using it for operating system and some games. All other programs get stuck on the 20gb drive, with files (mp3s, pdfs etc) on the 120gb drive.

5) No plans to, believe me. I switched to 2000pro as soon as was possible, then upgraded to xp pro after using it for a few months at school. I find the biggest advantage to xp is the fast user switching. Saves me from having to log out and shut down all my programs if Seri needs to do something on my computer.

That said, FDisk has no problems detecting 20GB hard drives. It's detected my 120GB drive before.

 

[RyanL]

Is there an echo in here?

 

[thatdarncat]

Weird...