Need Help: Trouble recognizing 1st HD Partition

[sgarsson]

I am trying to rebuild my giga computer.

The win registry got corrupt so I am attempting to reinstall windows 98SE.

The problem is when I boot from a startup 98 disk, the first partition on either of my HDs is not being seen. I have one HD in Primary (10Megs, 2 partitions) and one in Secondary (60megs, 3 partition).

I have changed cables, I have tried each HD separately, trying each one in the Primary and secondary.

If I let the machine boot to windows on the corrupted winreg partition, it asks to go to safe mode but will recognize the 1st partition (since win is on the first one). I can then also navigate in windows explorer among c: and d: drive. Yet when I reboot to startup disk, c: goes away and d: becomes c: to the OS.

I don\'t know why all of a sudden I am having this problem. I originally installed win to the 10gig partitioned drive (in the first partition 3 meg spot).

Computer HW is Intel Mobo 815e chipset, 700 Celeron, 512 RAM, Maxtor 7200 drives.

I will be most appreciative of any ideas to try. I am out of commission right now and pretty frustrated. Don\'t know if this is Mobo related or what. Can\'t see why 2 different HDs would have the same thing happen.

Thanks in advance big-time, this pretty much stinks,

Scott images/icons/confused.gif

[BlueNote]

When you say reinstall- are you trying to install over the existing installation, hoping to \"restore\" your system as it was? Or are you going for a clean install (which probably is the way you have to go)

There might be several reasons why your C: drive won\'t turn up when you boot to dos from diskette. Are you booting from the win98se recovery disk? (older versions of win9x might not recognise your fat version correctly) I suspect this is not your problem. Most likely your partition is corrupted in some way. My approach would be to run fdisk (or preferrably Partition Magic if you own this), display the partitions on the disks first (this might give you a hint on whats going on) delete the partition in question, make a new partition. (Make sure this is set to Active), format it, reinstall windows.

You could check first that the right partition is set to active in fdisk/partitionmagic, and make sure that no partition is marked as hidden. You might experience problems in w9x if you have more than one primary partition as well.

Hope this can help you.. (Maybe it just adds to the confussion??)
images/icons/rolleyes.gif

[sgarsson]

Bluenote,

Thanks for the speedy reply. Yes I would like to do a clean install of win98 SE and yes I am booting from the 98 recovery disk.

Sounds like I need partitionmagic as a start. What do you mean by ACTIVE partition? The one that is active for formatting or just that it is available for use?

How would more than one primary partition get created? What is a primary partition? :-) Obviously don\'t know my HD\'s very well.

Thanks again.

Scott

[sgarsson]

And the survey says. . . .

Turn off EZ-Bios on all drives before trying to boot from recovery disk :-)

Thanks again for the help Bluenote.

Scott