Eternal loop

[the_adairs]

I recently was given a 6gb hard drive that I wanted to use as a back up, while installing it into my system as a single drive to see what it had on it, I was given the prompt " no operating system found". So I poped in my win98 boot disk, and ran Fdisk on the single partition that it had. I then disconnected it, put on my other 4gb hard drive with the windows 98, and booted back up, I then got the following error on boot up " Disk drive eroror, please insert boot disk into drive a, press any key to enter". I put in the boot disk, then rebooted the system again with the disk out, and kept getting the same error message. It seemed to have been locked in some eternal loop, I eventually had to put in the 6 gb hard drive, boot from a boot cd, install 98 on that hard drive, then swap and install the 4gb and reboot before I could get the system to work again. Needless to say 3 hrs later, I got it all working. So...I have the following questions.

1. How do I get out of this loop in the future.

2. How do I format the 6gb hard drive to use as a piggy back on the 4gb hard drive without getting into another loop.

3. When I try to piggy back both drives together, the 6 does not register, but when I pop in a 2gb hard drive, it registers as a d drive.

thanks,
Jerry Adair

[nebulus200]

Just a blind guess, but the first place I would look if you are having bizarre disk problems is in your BIOS. Make sure your BIOS has properly detected the drive and its size (perhaps it wasn't). Also, If you were trying to hook both drives up together (master/slave), and both of them at one time were probably masters since they were the only thing in there (or maybe both are CS). Try setting the drive you want to boot up off of as master and the new drive as a slave and make sure that your cable settings match what you have selected.

Once you have that properly setup and your BIOS is seeing your drives correctly, you should be able to boot up like normal and run fdisk on the new drive.

Good luck,

Neb

[the_adairs]

Ill have to do some research on checking bios, never have done that before, as for the drives, My 4gb was set up as the Master, and the 6gb as the slave. Both had win98 on them, and when I tried this first, I just got the start up screen for the type comp I have (emachine window before the boot screen), and that would hang for as long as it wanted, rebooted with either drive, would boot up fine. Set the 4gb as Master and a 2 gb as slave with no os or anything on it, and it detected it as secondary ide drive. Not sure why it would not detect the other hard drive as a slave, followed the jumper diagram for the clip placement per the instructions on the face of the hard drive. I now have a spare 6gb hard drive with 98 on it that I could use for a third pc, just curious about the issue at hand. Maybe the os on both are cancelling each other out?

[nebulus200]

Possibly the OS's on each drive are interfering with each other; however, whatever drive is selected as master should be the one that boots up, but I am not sure of that one, I know I have done it before (putting an old drive in as slave that had Windows on a newer PC with no problems). Usually if you press escape on whatever screen pops up it will take you to a screen showing you details; however, the key you press to get into the bios changes around depending on who made the bios and what rev, from delete, to escape, to one of the F keys.

Question, when you change the jumper settings on the 6Gb drive to slave, does it show up when the PC boots as a detected drive ?

Neb

[the_adairs]

No!! thats the annoying thing. The 6gb drive is not showing up as a detected drive, even when I swap them around and make the 6 a master and the 4 as slave, it still doesnt work. But when I place the 6 and 2 or 4 and 2, the 2g always is detected as a secondary drive. The only thing I can think of..is that the two OS's are negating each other, there both tryign to boot up as the Master..maybe? Not sure about that because they should be running on the ide cable jumper switch as who is M/s. Now Im gun shy about trying to fdisk and format the 6g drive because I dont want the eternal loop asking about the book disk thing to start up again. Its sorta...got them working again, dont mess with it and screw it up. *L*

[SodaMoca5]

Instead of a master slave try setting the 4 GB HD as master on the primary IDE and the 6GB as master of the secondary IDE. There can sometimes be errors between older and newer drives when the older is set to master. You will probably have to move your CD-ROM to slave or CS on the secondary or primary IDE.

I believe this could solve your problem.

As for the infinite loop the only thing I can think of is did you FDisk, reboot to floppy,and then format. It could be that your system was remembering some task it needed to complete (finishing the Fdisk). I would have tried booting to floppy again, re-fdisk and re-partition the drive. Reboot to floppy, format the drive, then swap out drives. If this didn't get it out of the loop then I would definitely say something is going on in your BIOS which should not be.

Hope this helps.

[the_adairs]

Rubbing my chin* Hmmmm...never thought about setting up a master hard drive on primary and secondary ide slots, and cdrom as slave, Wonder if you could connect 3 hard drives. I currently have 4/2gb on primary and cd rom on secondary, wonder if I could set up the 6gb on the secondary wiht the cd rom as slave. I might try it next weekend, although I didnt think you could M/s different devices on the same ide slot.

[SodaMoca5]

You can have any combo you want. Currently on my wife's system I have Primary Master = 20GB HD, Primary Slave CDRW, Secondary Master = 10GB HD, Secondary Slave = DVDROM.

On my System Primary Master= 40GB HD, no slave, Secondary Master = 40 GB HD, Secondary Slave DVDROM. I had a buddy who had three drives and a CDRW. The IDE will support up to 4 devices what they are is your choice.

Of course make sure that the hard drives are compatible. I do not know the status now but I used to have a 540 MB HD (Yeah it was a screamer in its day) and it would not slave to my new 800 MB HD. Supposedly they had fixed this but there still might be problems slaving an older drive to a newer one.

[the_adairs]

Cool!! thanks for the info. Think that might work seeting up my 6 and 4 as Masters on the primary and secondary ide, then slave the 2 gb and cdrom respectivly.

Learn something new every day.

[bowlfreak]

Just now reading/reviewing this thread...but wanted to make sure I understood something correctly, because I will have to work on the wife's machine in the near future. The steps I have followed in the past are (1)Check master/slave settings on drives and check cabling. (2)Press key sequence to get into BIOS to make sure both drives (or all devices) are recognized. (3)If all drives are recognized, swap master slave settings to make sure that the devices do work in the event of a crash.

I want to make sure that I have things right when I go to add a drive to her machine so she can program .Net stuff for work - and not lose the Win2K drive. Thanks for any tips...

[SodaMoca5]

All of your steps are fine but you don't have to swap the settings unless you are assuming the problem will be a software one and not hardware (not a bad assumption). Also if you are just setting it up I would recommend getting two of the same type of drive and get ghost. Then instead of regularly copying you could regularly ghost an image of your first drive to your second one. You could then maintain a number of ghosted images labelled by date. If your drive gets corrupted you will not need to swap things around you will simply have to boot to the ghost floppy and restore from the second drive to the first the last latest image that was not affected by whatever corrupted your system.

Personally I consider this method far superior to backup. If you have a CDRW you can also copy these images to it for a more permanent archive and depending upon the value of the data you probably should consider keeping a set of these CD's off site.

Hope this helps.

[bowlfreak]

It's been a while since I've worked with Win98, so please refresh my memory on this. The master and slave configuration is one of the few ways to have a readily-available backup of the data. Ghost and backups to tape or CD are also possible. Does Win98 support hardware/software disk mirroring or RAID configuration?

[Sgt_B]

The master and slave configuration is one of the few ways to have a readily-available backup of the data

bowlfreak:
The Master/Slave settings are are used for how the hardware connects to the MB through the IDE cable. There may be more to it, but for all intents and purposes, lets just leave it at that. Simply because you have two hard drives set up in this manner does not mean that your second hard drive is a backup of your first. In order to ensure that your data is being backed up on your second hdd, you must use some of the other methods discussed in this post, particularly SodaMoca5's ideas. There are other types of desktop backup software out there as well.

[Troy11277]

Dude....the problem is that you have 2 hard drives with the same exact drive letters and the same exact OS on them. In bootup, your machine is going to look at the system partition for the boot files. When there are 2 c drives, or what have you, with the same information for boot parameters it defaults to the master then doesn't know how to read the slave. Take the 4 g drive out. Run the 6 g by itself and fdisk it. Then, bring the 4g back in the pic as master, and the 6 back as slave. Make sure your jumper settings are correct. Boot up with your 4 g OS and format the 6 g drive from there. It should work. I had the same problem when I did the same thing about a month ago.

[Sgt_B]

Love your sig Troy!
Semper Fi!

[SodaMoca5]

The only position that is critical to Windows is the Primary Master. It will be the C drive and will be the one it looks to for booting up.

You can use a third party boot manager to have multi boot capability or to boot from a different drive.

Second, as stated previously being on the same IDE cable only affects data flow through the cable. The Master has priority over the Slave. However, the Slave is an independent device.

Win98 does not have native RAID control. If you want a RAID system you have to buy an add on RAID controller. However for an effective RAID system you are going to want RAID 3 at a minimum. RAID 1 (mirroring) only protects you from hard drive failure. Viruses etc. will kill both hard drives in a RAID 1 system. Also, slow hardware degradation will affect both because the RAID 1 driver will not distinguish between good data and bad.

Personally I still think that it is best to use a good back up software or even a shareware copy software for data and ghost or a similar tool for the entire system. The latest ghost even allows you to image to and restore from multiple CD's and the restore time is awesome. If you restore from a hard drive it takes about 20 minutes or less to get your entire system back from an image. I am not sure of the time from CD. Of course this time is dependent upon the amount of data you have on the drive.

Hope this helps.

[allenb1963]

This is just me personally....given the amount of trouble you seem to be having, I would update my bios, then head over to www.pricewatch.com and buy a 20 gig for around 60 bucks and be done with it.