[mpriester]

Hi:

I have an old Dell Deminsion XPS P90 system, and I wanted to install a new 20GB hard drive. According to the diskette, the BIOS currently won't support a drive that large. According to the Western Digital hard drive tools diskette, it would have to install EZ-BIOS in order for the system to "recognize" the new hard drive. The problem with this is that EZ-BIOS doesn't have CD-ROM support, and I therefore couldn't install Windows 98 from a CD-ROM, and would have to use floppy diskettes (which I don't have).

I decided to try and get around this by using a 1.6GB hard drive as the main C:\ drive, with the 20GB as a D:\ drive, thinking I could install Windows 98 on the 1.6GB first, and then use the diskette to set up the new 20GB hard drive as a slave. I formatted the 1.6GB drive and was installing Windows 98 when the power in my home went out briefly. When it came back up, the C:\ drive had a weird directory on it: Window0 400. When I attempted to install Windows again, the screen went crazy, and I kept getting crazy symbols (like the ace of clubs from a card deck, etc.) on the screen.

I rebooted and reformatted the drive. I decided to use FDISK to check the partition. When I entered FDISK, I pressed 4 to display the partition information, and the Volume Label had some of the same crazy symbols as the system displayed when I attempted to reformat the drive.

I attempted to delete the partition, but FDISK said that the volume labels didn't match, as I couldn't reproduce some of the symbols. FIDSK did apparently delete the partition, but now when I attempt to create a new partition, it shows that the drive now only has 1547MB of space, even though the system BIOS recognizes the full 1.6GB.

Now I can reformat the hard drive, and create a main directory (Example: C:\Windows), but I can't apparently create any sub-folders or directories, nor can I install Windows. If I go to a DOS prompt and to the Windows directory, it says that the C:\Windows directory is there. If I do a dir/p to see what's in the directory, the computer "beeps" repeatedly, and displays a whole string of the crazy symbols (smiley face, ace of clubs, etc.)! I am completely stumped...Can I recover the use of the drive, or is it shot?

[Rockn]

If the BIOS does not recognize the drive it will not work as a slave drive either unless you use some kind of drive overlay program. The fdisk and format will also never work correctly without it.

[mpriester]

That's what the Western Digital Data Lifeguard Tools diskette is for. It will install a software program called "EZ-BIOS" that apparently will "bypass" the system BIOS and recognize the drive.

The problem is that this software doesn't have CD-ROM support, so I can't install Windows 98 from my CD-ROM.

The problem is getting around the erros I'm encountering with the 1.6GB hard drive.