"Dennis" wrote in message
. ..
I was able to get my new system to boot from a floppy by changing drives.
Even though the first one wasn't giving errors during POST it must have
been
not quite good enough to boot from.

Make sure your jumper on the HDD is set correctly. For example, with a WD
HDD, you would have no jumper or put the jumper on "neutral" if it is the
only drive hooked to the computer.

I was able to use FDISK to detect the hard drive and see partition
information. The partitions were all formatted with NTFS so I couldn't
get
too much info with a Windows 98 startup disk, but it did tell me that was
the case.

I also tried a 40 GB 5400 RPM Quantum drive with one extended partition.
I
know this drive had been cleared of useful files so I wanted to
repartition
it with a active FAT32 so I could try to boot from it. FDISK said there
were no logical drives on it but I couldn't delete it because it had
logical
drives! It does have two drives formatted with NTFS. I was able to make
an
active FAT32 partition in 8 MB of unused space and copy some DOS utilities
to it, but I still couldn't boot from it.

With FDISK, you can delete the NTFS partitions by selecting "delete non-DOS
partition" in the FDISK menu. Be sure to read through all of the menu
options under FDISK, that may help solve your problem.

I also tried an old 1.04 GB drive with one active DOS partition, and again
it would not boot. But I was able to view the files on it after booting
with the floppy, including reading text files and playing a game of
Scorched
Earth!!

Again, check jumper setting on HDD. Does this HDD have Win9x on it, or just
DOS? In any case, it will need an OS on the primary partition to boot to a
C:\ prompt or GUI.

So why can it read these drives but not boot from them?? One thing I
noticed is that they are set up with LBA but I think they were originally
LARGE. FDISK also suggested enabling LARGE support. I tried to manually
change it to LARGE in the BIOS, but I would get a line of text saying it
couldn't read the drive. I guess that is better than STOP errors but
still
not good enough. Do I need to completely erase all data and partitions
from
the drive and then repartition and reformat it with the A7N8X? That
didn't
work with the 8 MB partition on the 40 GB drive.

If the HDDs are partitioned to NTFS (to the primary partition), they won't
boot unless you've installed WinNT, 2K, or XP. If the primary partition is
DOS, FAT, or FAT32, the HDD should boot fine unless the Master Boot Record
is corrupt, or contains conflicting information (did you try using the HDD
manufacturer's installation floppy?).

Another thing to try is erasing the Master Boot Record. To do this, use the
undocumented command "FDISK /MBR". Keep in mind that this will likely erase
any partition information, meaning you'll lose all partitions on the HDD.
It is a quick and dirty option for getting up and running, though.

The longer option is to write zeroes to the drive using the HDD
manufacturer's installation/diagnostic tools disk. This will take a while,
but it's the best way to ensure that you've a clean HDD with no MBR or
partition info of any kind left to corrupt the disk (make sure your floppies
don't contain a MBR virus, btw). Once you have written zeroes to the HDD,
you have two options:

1) install WinXP from a boot CD.... the installation process will format
your HDD for you (NTFS preferred).

or

2) if installing Win9x, use the installation disk that came with your HDD.
If you don't have the disk, go to the HDD manufactuer's website and download
their installation software. The installation disk should allow you to
format the HDD to FAT32 (Win9x won't work with NTFS). If you don't want to
use the installation disk, you will have to use the "FDISK" and "FORMAT"
commands from the Win98 floppy. Problem here is that FDISK only recognizes
up to 33GB or so of HDD per partition, so you may have to have multiple
partitions with FDISK to get your entire HDD's storage volume.
HTH