Hi.
>
> Steve Dias wrote:
> >
> > Helped a friend add a second hard drive to his Packard Bell 486/66 and ran
> > into trouble getting the right jumper settings for these old drives. His
> > original Seagate 425mb IDE with Win95 on it is master, (one primary dos
> > partition, marked active) and a Quantum LPS 245mb we added as slave. Finally
> > got slave jumpered right, right settings in setup, fdisked (extended dos
> > partition w/ logical drive D:) and formatted. Scandisk reports no problems.
> >
> > Problem: Every time we reboot, we get an error message "fixed drive has no
> > boot sector". Pressing F1 to continue, machine will boot to Win95 on C:,
> > both drives are recognized and useable in Windows.
>
> I'm not super familiar with the intricacies of fdisk, but perhaps DOS is
> complaining because all of the second drive is an extended DOS
> partition? I wonder if it should have been fdisk'ed as a primary
> partition. (Not set active, of course.)
>
        Having a whole second disk with an extended partition is common, to
avoid DOS letter assignment misorder. However, if there is a primary partition
on the second disk, it is irrelevant if it is marked active or not: normal
booting is from the active partition on the first disk; however, recall that
modern bios give you options to boot from the second, third or fourth disk
(badly indicated as D, E or F), so probably it is necessary to have an
active partition to use this feature (bios probably fetches the MBR and gives
control to it).
        For your problems:
        -Make sure your jumpers are correct.
        -Run SYS C:.

************************************
Javier Vizcaino. Ability Electronics. [log in to unmask]
  Starting point:        (-1)^(-1) = -1
  Applying logarithms: (-1)*ln(-1) = ln(-1)
  Since ln(-1) <> 0, dividing:  -1 = 1     (ln(-1) is complex, but exists)