Boot disk (W98)

[Rab]

I am running Windows 98.I have two hard drives installed on the primary Ide channel.The master is 8.4Gb,and is the normal C drive.The slave is 30Gb,and is the normal D drive.I use this solely for video editing.My Cd-rom is the normal E drive,and is on the Secondary Ide channel and is jumpered as slave.When I boot up with the E.B.D. floppy and boot into DOS,I can access all the drives,the problem being that the drives change their drive letter.Eg. in DOS,the normal D drive becomes C.The Ram drive becomes D.The Cd rom stays at E in both Windows and DOS.So in DOS the normal C drive and its files does not exist.Its place being taken by the normal D drive and its files.So therefore, if I want to re-partition and re-format drive C and re-install Windows, I will be doing it to the wrong drive,ie the normal drive D.Incidently,when in Windows,and I select "re-start in Ms-dos",my system freezes.Dont know if this is relevent or not.Anybody got any advice on the above problem please ?.

[jmatt]

How to Prevent Drive Letters from Changing After You Add a Hard Disk or a CD-ROM (Q282530)
http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;EN-US;q282530

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Letter Assigner . ( Freeware )
http://www.v72735.f2s.com/LetAssig/Screenshots.html

[BertImmenschuh]

In addition to the other reply, consider this: in the 'olden' MS-DOS days, drive letters were assigned thusly:
First floppy drive = A
Second floppy drive = B
First hard drive = C
Second hard drive when present = D
Second partition on first hard drive = E
Second partition on second hard drive = F
this follows until all hard drives and partitions were lettered, drives first partitions next.
Then the CD drives were assigned letters following the last drive/partition.

Win95 usually followed the same scheme due to its 16-bit compatibility.
Win98 allowed using drive letters further down, e.g. you could assign the CD the letter X.

Win2K/XP doesn't use much DOS and goes even further.

[Andy-S]

If your goal is to reformat the C: and re-install windows then try the following. Unplug the D: and the CD ROM from the system. Boot up with the W98 boot disk and make sure you can see the drive. Try formatting it from there. Once it is formatted add the CD again and install windows. Add the D: once you have Windows installed.

Cheers
Andy

[Rab]

Andy-s,thanks for replying.Did as you advised.Booted into DOS via Emerg. floppy.This time,the Ram drive and its files appeared as the C drive.This Ram drive appears to be elbowing the other drives aside.Can I re-partition and re-format my normal C drive without this Ram drive?.I believe that the Windows 95 Emerg.boot disk does not install the Ram drive.My thanks also to Jmatt and Bertimmenschuh for their advice.

[BertImmenschuh]

Any time the RAM Drive takes a letter that should be assigned to a hard drive, something has happened that is preventing the boot disk from seeing that hard drive. In your case where the RAM Drive is C, the actual hard drive is invisible to the boot disk. After booting to the floppy, at the A:\ prompt, type fdisk. When at a menu with several choices listed, if number 5 is there, select it and see what drives are there. Esc back and choose number 4 to view the first drive. You can go back to 5 and change drives and do 4 again. See if anything agrees with what you know about the drives. If anything says it is a non-DOS partition, there is a problem.

[report_2]

If I am not mistaken it is your EBD that is creating the Ram drive. The boot disk has more info than will fit onto the 1.44 floppy so it creates the Ram drive to unload the info onto.

Try using a new boot disk that will only do what you need done.

bootdisk.com I believe has an assortment of boot disks to choose from.

[Andy-S]

Rab,

What version of Windows 98 are you currently running? You can get the version by right clicking on my computer and selecting properties. I downloaded the W98 SE boot disk from <a target="_blank" href=http://dos.li5.org/>http://dos.li5.org/</a> and this does not create a RAM drive and I managed to access my C: with no problems.

Don't know if this will also work for you as you may have another problem. In my experience when a RAM drive is created all the other drive letters are offset. I have never been unable to access a drive unless the drive was bad or had the NTFS file system.

Anyway try out the bootdisk for your version of Windows 98 from the above URL and see if you still have the same problem.

Cheers
Andy

[Rab]

Did as you suggested.The following interesting info was revealed.The problem drive,ie the normal C drive,was listed as "Current fixed disk drive= 1".The info was listed thus; Partition:1,Status:A,Type:non-dos,Volume label:blank,System:blank,Usage:100%. The slave drive was listed as Current fixed drive =2.Its info was listed as; Partition C=1,Status:A,Type:Pri-dos,Volume label:disk2part02,System:Fat 32,Usage:100%.It would appear that my problem is due to the normal C drive type being regarded as a non-dos drive.This drive is the one that was installed when I bought the computer.The slave drive was installed by myself.Both worked fine afterwards.I would add that both are Maxtor,5200rpm and 7000rpm respectively.The slave was installed using Maxblast +.The computer was taken back to the supplier immediately after purchase as it had 95 installed instead of 98.A clean install of 98 1st version was done.I have added the above in case it is relevent.Why is the normal C drive shown as non-dos,and how do I rectify this?.My thanks for your help so far.

[Rab]

Thanks for the advice.Have a look at my reply to Bertimmenschuh.

[Rab]

I am running 98 1st. version.I downloaded and tried booting from the E.B.D. for 98 SE, just to see what would happen.Not surprisingly I got a " Non system disk error".Never mind,worth a try anyway.Thanks for the advice.Have a look at my reply to Bertimmenschuh.

[report_2]

It would appear faster 7200rpm drive is set as your primary C: drive.

My thinking is that Windows is seeing the partitions as you have them assigned but DOS is seeing them as they are attached to the system.

The only tool I know of that will spell out what is what is Partition Magic; perhaps someone else knows of another way.

[BertImmenschuh]

The C drive or first drive/partition being non-DOS will always create problems for operating systems using FAT/FAT16/FAT32. It is hard to put those OS's on anything other than the first drive, which also has to be the bootable drive and marked as Active. That is what the BIOS looks at.

Your C drive or drive 1 [may even show as drive 0] may have been formatted as NTFS. Or it is possible that drive/partition is set aside by the maker to hold the restore files for the computer. I believe at this point that I would back up everything I wanted to keep that exists nowhere else, delete the partitions with fdisk, and start all over.

[Rab]

Thanks for the advice.I will look into Partition Magic.

[Rab]

Excuse my ignorance,or maybe its my memory,what is NTFS formatting?.I am in agreement with you about re-partitioning and re-formatting drive C,but how do I do this,when the same drive is "invisible" to Dos ?.Catch 22 or is it?.

[report_2]

Delpart will do the job for free.

<a target="_blank" href=http://www.rustysmith.com/delpart.htm>http://www.rustysmith.com/delpart.htm</a>

[Rab]

Thanks for that.

[BertImmenschuh]

I was gone but the delpart is a good idea.

NTFS is a file system used by WinNT4/2000/XP.

[Rab]

Thanks for the info.I will post at a later date to let everyone know how I have progressed.