BIOS and MS-DOS

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?

 

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.

 

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.