Hard drive question

[kgeissler 0]

I have 2 hard drives in my system. One is NTFS, the other if FAT32. If I boot to a Win98 boot disk, I should be able to see the FAT32 drive, right?

 

Right now, that doesn't work and I can't figure out why.

 

Any ideas?

[BladeRunner 0]

I always say, check the 'silly' things first before you go all advanced

 

You haven't said in which order your HD's are in, NTFS as C or FAT32 as C.

However, if your C drive is FAT32 and your D drive is NTFS, if you boot from a Win98 floppy, your C drive will become D as the boot floppy creates a virtual drive C where it dumps all the required tools on.

 

Just making sure you aren't assuming the drive letters will stay the same from a boot floppy as they are from within Windows.

 

Next, are the HD's on standard IDE controllers, or special ones, IE ones that require drivers loading before they will be seen?

Thinks of those ABit motherbaords with 2x Standard IDE controllers and 2x ATA-100 Highpoint controllers, if the HD's were attached to the Highpoint you'd need to load DOS drivers onto the boot disk before you could see them.

[kgeissler 0]

Ok..

 

Hard Drive 1 (12GB) - Has 3 partitions:

C: 2GB - NTFS

D: 5GB - NTFS

E: 5GB - NTFS

Hard Drive 2 (5GB) - Has 1 Partition

F: 5GB - FAT32

 

The hard drives are on the Primary IDE. Hard Drive 1 is the Master, Hard Drive 2 is the slave.

[Karl 0]

If your second HDD has a single partition on it then BladeRunner

was right. I would go ahead and check which drive letter it's using, because of ramdrives. The letter will change because dos can't tell what that "ntfs" stuff is . Have you tried different drive letters?

 

 

-Karl

[DosFreak 2]

The fat32 drive will be seen as the "C:" drive. Since 9x does not recognize NTFS as a valid filesystem. Make sure that you are actually using a 95OSR2+ disk. A pre-osr2 disk cannot read FAt32.

[BladeRunner 0]

"The fat32 drive will be seen as the "C:" drive. Since 9x does not recognize NTFS as a valid filesystem"

 

But will it?

A Win98 boot disk creates a 'virtual C' drive where it puts all the tools for formatting, fdisk etc.

Surely his FAT partition should be seen as D with a Win98 boot disk?

[DosFreak 2]

The ramdrive will be the "C:" drive if a valid partition is not recognized. If ramdrive is "C:" then no partitions are recognized.

[kgeissler 0]

When I boot, I go straight to the command prompt. I bypass all the startup files.