SG Broadband Community

Hi,

My brother brought his PC (Win98, PIII 600MHz, 256MB RAM, Maxtor 30GB HD) over this morning to my house, he wanted help in doing a clean install of windows. Turned out I had a spare 3GB HD lying around, so I thought it would be a good idea to install both drives, to later use the small one as a paging file-only drive.

So... I decided we'd install the HD first... and after changing both drive's jumpers to make the big one Master and the small one Slave, we connected everything back, powered it on, went into the BIOS and hit F3 (auto detect); and it was only detecting the small drive (not sure why...).

Anyway, we then decided the small HD troubleshooting should've been left for AFTER we had installed a fresh Windows on it. So we remove the small drive, and set the original HD (30GB one) back to the way it was, which led to the problem we're stuck in, and the reason why I've come to seek help to these forums:

We power the PC on, it does the initial memory check, then the IRQ screen comes up, it detects Floppy, then CD, then IDE 0, ...and that's it. No Windows 98 boot screen! It just stays stuck where it says "IDE 0 ... ok"

We've double checked everything as far as how the cables are hooked up, and even tried a couple of different jumper combos, but every single time, it gets stuck at "IDE 0 ... ok" without proceeding to the Windows 98 screen...

Could this be a hardware (HD?) issue? Or is it possible that some of the Windows boot settings (files?) got screwed when we tried to install the other smaller hard drive?

Thanks a lot guys, I hope someone here has the answer to this...

Sounds like you have two device configured for primary slave... In other words the jumpers are wrong. Set both drives to cable select(if you can't figure out the proper jumper configuration) and place the 30gb drive on the end of the cable and the other drive in the middle.

Sid wrote:Sounds like you have two device configured for primary slave... In other words the jumpers are wrong. Set both drives to cable select(if you can't figure out the proper jumper configuration) and place the 30gb drive on the end of the cable and the other drive in the middle.

Nope, that's actually one of the first methods we used, but the problem is the same each and every time:

We power the PC on, the BIOS does the memory check, then the 2nd BIOS screen comes up:

Searching for boot record for floppy... OK
Searching for boot record for IDE - 0... OK

:::: And that's where it gets stuck ::::

[quote="Bighunk"]Hi,

My brother brought his PC (Win98, PIII 600MHz, 256MB RAM, Maxtor 30GB HD) over this morning to my house, he wanted help in doing a clean install of windows. Turned out I had a spare 3GB HD lying around, so I thought it would be a good idea to install both drives, to later use the small one as a paging file-only drive.

So... I decided we'd install the HD first... and after changing both drive's jumpers to make the big one Master and the small one Slave, we connected everything back, powered it on, went into the BIOS and hit F3 (auto detect)]
Try resetting or discharging your Cmos, reboot go into bios and redect HD

You want to do "Cable Select" only if A) The motherboard support that feature, and B) You have a "Cable Select" compatible ribbon cable.

If you're not sure, just stick with Master/Slave. If a single drive, try it on master if CS isn't picking it up.

Or just leave the jumper off completely if it's a single drive.