----- Original Message -----
From: Venkat Viswanathan
Sent: Sunday, January 16, 2005 8:52 AM
Subject: [PCBUILD] win 98se problem



Hi all list members,My 5 year old celeron 667 mhz cpu decided to go to
heaven and so I bought a new ASUS mobo model P4GE-MX and celeron D CPU  and
connected everything,installed the drivers from the mobo cd and powered
after making sure that all the jumper settings were ok.

The bios  screen showed primary master=my old Maxtor hdd with win 98se and
all my data,slave=my old lg cd rom,secondary master=my old sony dvd player,
secondary slave=my old Samsung cdrw. Floppy=ok

::This is good, because it means that your hardware is all connected nicely,
and you haven't broken anything.  Make sure that the bios have recognized
the correct size for your hard drive, too.

However when I went into device manager it showed up only the hdd as storage
device and lg cdrom under cd rom.in other words windows did not detect my
dvd player and cdrw.so I fiddled around for nearly 3 days and suddenly
yesterday my screen froze at the win logo and would not load the os.
So I put in the free pc tech boot disk and my win 98se cd and got to the set
up stage after nearly one hour of scan of file structure,file system,
memory, free space, cross linked files etc etc by windows scan disk and
after a few "nexts"windows said that I don't have enough memory and I should
free up some space.

My problem (1) how do I get into my c drive to free space?c:\dir command
scrolled up so fast that I could see only the last 15 or so files out of a
total 390 at the end.up/dn arrows or scroll lock did not help in enabling me
to see files from the start.
Prob(2) how do I go to the beginning of the dir?in other words how do I free
space without being able to get into c drive?could it be that my scroll lock
is non functional?I know my c drive is chalkablock with only about 70/80 mb
space left.

::Evidently you are using dos to examine the drive.  I believe that the
command is dir /p.  The "/p" stands for "Pause," and will stop the screen
every twenty-four lines.  Then you can copy down the names of files that you
wish to delete.  This is a slow process, and I wonder if it is really
necessary, because you were able to get into 98 originally.

Prob(3) was windows not able to detect my dvdplayer,cdrom in the first
instance(the bios did) because the earlier  drive config(which I don't
remember) was in windows memory and my current drive config is different?

::That might be the cause.  Try switching the hardware and see if it fixes
this problem.

Prob(4) am I right in assuming that in non colour coded ide cable connectors
any one can go into the mobo, the last one at the end of the cable is MASTER
and the middle one is the SLAVE?this is how I have connected the drives now.

::I believe that this is correct when you use the "chip select."  But, you
should use the master and slave jumper settings if possible, in which case
which connector is used is not important.  I don't think that CS is used
much any more.


 In case formatting is the only answer can I transfer my data in the hdd to
the hdd in the DELL pc which also I have and if so how do I connect the two
pcs together and effect the transfer?

::I would reformat only as a desperate last resort!!  First I would try to
reinstall 98 over the old installation and see if that helps.  The easiest
way to transfer the data is to connect your hard drive in the Dell as a
slave and copy files.  If the one pc is not working, it will do no good to
connect the two pc's together. (?)

:Others may have some better suggestions, but these can get you started.

Dean Kukral

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