Dual boot and new drive means Win98 doesn't post

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09-24-2003, 04:07 AM
bras0782

Dual boot and new drive means Win98 doesn't post

I had a Win98SE and XP dual boot with two drives (30GB and 8GB). The 30GB drive was and still is the primary drive which stores all the OSes, programs, etc. It is partitioned into 4:

C: - Boot drive (FAT32)
D: - Win98SE (FAT32)
E: - WinXP (NTFS)
F: - misc (FAT32)

I've now replaced the 8GB drive with a new 120GB one - the setup is the same.

However, Win98SE no longer posts unless I disconnect the new drive - XP is fine though. This has something to do with the motherboard being an Abit KT7a-RAID - the OS drive is on the RAID channel whereas the new drive is on the IDE1 channel (as was the old drive).

When I load Win98 it drops out into a command prompt because it can't find any of the files. This was because the drive assigment seems to change. The C: drive is the same, but then the new drive takes D: and the main drive returns to take E: and F:. How can I force the new drive to take the last drive letter instead? Why does this not happen with WinXP?

Thanks
09-24-2003, 08:45 AM
russ_watters

POST is Power On Self Test. Its what you see for the first 5 seconds or so when you turn on your computer. No POST means blank screen. You mean BOOT.

Anyway, see if you can re-order the disks in BIOS. You may be forced to re-install 98 though.
09-27-2003, 12:35 PM
bras0782

Quote:

Originally posted by russ_watters
POST is Power On Self Test. Its what you see for the first 5 seconds or so when you turn on your computer. No POST means blank screen. You mean BOOT.

Anyway, see if you can re-order the disks in BIOS. You may be forced to re-install 98 though.

Whoops, you're right - I meant boot :o . I thought they were the same thing.

I can't reorder the HDDs in the bios because the main drive sits on one of the RAID channels - whereas the bios let's you mess about with what's connected to the IDE channels.

Any ideas?