D
Dennis
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.
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.
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!!
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.
Eeeewww!!!
Even though the first one wasn't giving errors during POST it must have been
not quite good enough to boot from.
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.
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!!
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.
Eeeewww!!!