adding hard drives to controller card in XP

  • Thread starter Thread starter Ray
  • Start date Start date
R

Ray

Every time I try to add a hard drive in my multiboot
system, Windows XP goes nuts although 98 boots fine. I
have a Promise ATA card with one drive c: containing
windows 98 and numerous other partitions. The MB IDE has
a second hard drive D: which has the XP OS on one
partition. When i need to work on a third drive, no
matter where I put it, XP refuses to boot. I always need
to choose 98 which is inconvenient. Is there any easy way
around this without hand editing a bunch of substitute
boot files on the c: drive?
 
boot windows xp. if your new hard drive came with a cd then use that and let
it install the driver and stuff like that. then it will tell you to install
the hard drive. try that then see if it doesnt work.
 
Ray said:
Every time I try to add a hard drive in my multiboot
system, Windows XP goes nuts although 98 boots fine. I
have a Promise ATA card with one drive c: containing
windows 98 and numerous other partitions. The MB IDE has
a second hard drive D: which has the XP OS on one
partition. When i need to work on a third drive, no
matter where I put it, XP refuses to boot. I always need
to choose 98 which is inconvenient. Is there any easy way
around this without hand editing a bunch of substitute
boot files on the c: drive?
Click to expand...

I would approach this by having the hard drives on the Mboard IDE and
put other types of device on the Promise card. I have a spare CD-RW
drive on one, which works fine. With no HD on the card, the Promise
UDMA BIOS does not load (and is not needed) and that is probably what is
getting in the way
 
I have a similar system that i have attached numerous
drives to, and it never asks me to install them. I
attach them and they appear automatically when windows
XP or 98 start.

The only difference is that the other system is on a RAID
motherboard so i can trick XP into thinking it is still
on the D: drive no matter what is attached with it as
long as there is at least one drive also attached.

I have ordered a RAID MB and I will reinstall XP in the
new computer configuration but before I can do that I
have to access my new drives, partition them and format
them. Win98 will not support a 120 GB and a 200 GB
drive; so I have to get into XP to do this.

A DOS utility floppy came with the 200 GB drive but
unfortunately my a: drive is an LS-120 and Western
Digital's stupid drive utilities can't find any of the
text files which the floppy won;t run without unless I
use a regular floppy drive.

This is maddening. Basically i have to build a new
computer to make my drives ready to build a new computer,
and even then i am not going to be able to backup to the
new drives because the old XP program can't work if they
are attached to the system.
 
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