Hello Kevin,

< On 06:16 PM 6/13/98 -0400, Kevin Staggers poked on the keyboard about >

>Boot into win95, go into a dos window and run fdisk.  I tell it yes to
>activate the fat32 stuff, change to disk 3.  (The new one)  And then
>created a primary dos partition of the full disk size.  No problems with
>that at all.  Close fdisk, close the dos window, and reboot.

>When I reboot, the new drive shows up as drive E:  I got back in a dos
>window and format E:  No problems, it's formatted and shows up in
>windows explorer and is accessible.

  One problem here.  You should have booted into Command prompt only mode
and completed the FDisk and Format through there.

>So, I copy several files over to
>it, roughly a gig of downloads and stuff.  I notice that my zip drive is
>not showing up, so I reboot now.  When windows boots back up, the zip
>drive appears as drive E:, and my new hard drive AND my cd-rom have
>dissapeared.  I notice in the device manager that it says my secondary
>ide controller isn't working properly (Has a yellow exclamation on it.)

  This could be becuase either the new hard drive is not setup as the
master drive correctly, a virus is lerking, or the CD-ROM was not setup
correctly. I see you have a solution below.

>So, not knowing what else to try, I download the newest Intel Ide bus
>drivers and install them.  After this, the cd-rom came back, and I can
>see the new hard drive in the device manager.  The secondary ide bus is
>functing correctly now also.  But, the new drive is STILL inacessible,
>and fdisk reports it as a "non-dos" partition.
>
>Any ideas out there?  I really need this data back if at all possible,
>it's not critical stuff, but it's important to me.  I didn't use a
>third-party disk utility to format the drive, I used windows' format and
>I partitioned it with fdisk and rebooted between the partitioning and
>formatting.

  Do you need the data on the new hard disc?  If so the company I work for
can help you. IIf you do not need the data back, this is what you can do.

1. Boot the computer, hit [F8] when it says loading Windows 95, in Command
Prompt mode. Run FDISK. Remove the non-dos partition. You would do this by
going into number 3 off of the main menu and using number 4 off of the next
menu. Then re-create the partition and then reboot.

2. Boot the computer again in command prompt mode and format the hard
drive. Reboot the computer and see if Windows 95 sees all of your storage
devices again.

  If not all of the storage devices are seen you will need to edit the
config.sys file and add lastdrive=z, I set z because it is the last drive
letter anyone would use :)

Good luck,


Tim Lider
Advanced Data Solutions              ICQ: 7562541
Web Site: http://www.adv-data.com E-Mail: Mailto:[log in to unmask]