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Win 98 Reinstall/Format HD Trouble

Discussion in 'PC Hardware' started by ddoorn, 2002/01/14.

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  1. 2002/01/14
    ddoorn

    ddoorn Inactive Thread Starter

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    sticky-wicket time...have never had this type of
    trouble before when formatting and reinstalling
    Windows:

    This problem resulted following some hard drive
    swapping my son had done. He pulled the 2nd of 2
    drives on his old pc and put it into his new pc.
    Everything works fine on his.

    However, he pulled my old hard drive from my old pc to
    put in as the 2nd drive on my son's old pc so that I
    could use it as my pc and dump my old pc.

    This is the pc with the trouble...Win 98 wouldn't boot
    up and it appeared everything on my old drive was gone
    so I thought I would run FDISK and FORMAT and
    reinstall Win98, etc.

    However, the problem I ran up against, firstly is that
    during the boot up process it maintained that there
    was "floppy drive failure ". The floppy light was on
    all the time. However it appeared to be able to access
    my floppy at the A: as it listed the contents of the
    boot disk when I typed in "dir ".

    So I ran FDISK and deleted primary partition and then
    attempted to create the primary DOS partition. This is
    where I get hung up. It would attempt to "verify drive
    integrity" by running up the percentage. However it
    would run up to varying degrees of percentage, then
    kick back to zero. Eventually it would even run up to
    99%...but still kick back to zero and start over
    again.

    After a while I could see I was getting nowhere.

    I thought perhaps it wasn't accessing proper files
    from floppy due to "floppy drive failure" so I went
    into the bios and disabled the floppy boot check and
    tried using the Win98 boot cd I created for my son's
    laptop. Same result as above.

    So then I thought perhaps the Master Boot Record was
    corrupt. I tried to use the A:/fdisk /mbr command, but
    this only brought me back to A:/fdisk. Running fdisk
    again brought me right back to the loop I mentioned
    above.

    Next I thought perhaps it had to run through this loop
    over & over to verify drive integrity.

    Result? after reboot I again kick into the cd boot
    disk and run A:\fdisk only to get this error message:

    No Fixed disks present.

    Sorry for the long account, but wanted to give you a
    fairly accurate summary of what's been going wrong.

    Do you have any ideas...? Is it possible that the hard
    drive is dead...? It's not really that old a drive,
    couple of years.

    Thanks, in advance,

    Don
    ddoorn@yahoo.com
     
  2. 2002/01/15
    Cliffh

    Cliffh Inactive

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    Double check the data cable connection to the floppy drive. Normally, if the light stays on all of the time it indicates that the cable is on backwards - 180 degrees out. Make sure that pin 1 on the cable (the stripe on the cable) is attached to pin 1 on both the controller and floppy drive.

    Check the jumper settings on the hard drives. The old drive that was in the system should already be set properly - it had a slave attached to it at one time - but the new drive may not be set correctly. The old drive should be set as Master/Single or Master w/Slave, the new drive as Slave. I don't use Cable Select even in a system that's designed to be able to use it.

    Have you tried the old drive by itself?
     

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  4. 2002/01/15
    ddoorn

    ddoorn Inactive Thread Starter

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    Thanks so much! I'm hoping this will give my son enough clues... Typically, HE'S the hardware guy & I'M the software guy... I tend to be all thumbs and he doesn't have the patience to learn the ins & outs of Windows, et. al. So we work well together, however, he's away at college until the weekend...we will definately collaborate and test your suggestions out!

    I'll keep you posted on developments.

    Don
     
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